Understanding Color helps you connect the dots between your emotional, intuitive responses to color and the theories that explain them.

Features:

• Updated material for successfully designing with color in a digital environment
• Innovative coverage of color marketing issues
• Dozens of new illustrations
• Helpful tips for using color in the working environment
• Valuable exercises to reinforce color concepts

Contents

An Introduction to Color Study

• The Experience of Color
• Color Awareness
• The Uses of Color
• Color-Order Systems
• Color Study

A Little Light on the Subject

• Light
• Mixing Light: Additive Color
• Lamps
• Lighting Level
• Vision
• The Illuminant Mode of Vision
• The Object Mode of Vision
• Modifying Light: Colorants
• Modifying Light: Surface
• Transparent, Opaque, and Translucent
• Lamps and Color Rendition
• Metamerism and Matching
• Luminosity
• Indirect Light, Indirect Color
• Modifying Light: Filters

The Human Element

• The Sensation of Color
• Visual Acuity for Color
• Threshold
• Intervals
• The Perception of Color
• Physiology: Responding to Light
• Healing and Color
• Synaesthesia
• Psychology: Responding to Light
• Color and Meaning
• Naming Colors

The Vocabulary of Color: Hue

• Hue
• The Artists’ Spectrum
• Primary and Secondary Colors
• Saturated Color
• Other Spectrums, Other Primaries
• Chromatic Scales
• Cool and Warm Colors
• Analogous Colors
• Complementary Colors
• Equilibrium
• Simultaneous Contrast
• Afterimage and Contrast Reversal
• Complementary Contrast
• Tertiary Colors: Muted Hues and Brown
• Black, White, Gray

The Vocabulary of Color: Value and Saturation

• Value
• Value and Image
• Transposing Image
• Pure Hues and Value
• Tints and Shades
• Monochromatic Value Scales
• Comparing Value in Different Hues
• Saturation
• Saturation: Diluting Pure Hues with Gray
• Saturation: Diluting Pure Hues with the Complement
• Tone

Working with Color

• Color Composition
• Ground and Carried Colors
• Placement and Color Change
• Ground Subtraction
• Reversing the Illusion: Two Colors as One
• Influenced and Influencing Colors
• Optical Mixes: Partitive Color
• Spatial Effects of Colors
• Color Illusions
• Spreading Effect
• Color and Area

Color Harmony

• In Search of Beauty
• A Brief History of Color Theory
• Color Theory and Harmony
• Color Harmony: From the Ground Up
• Intervals and Harmony
• Hue and Harmony
• Value and Harmony
• Saturation and Harmony
• Major and Minor Themes
• Some Harmonious Conclusions
• On Beyond Harmony: Visual Impact.
• On Beyond Harmony: Dissonant Colors
• The X(tra)-Factor: Surface and Harmony

Tools of the Trade

• It’s the Real Thing: Color in Product and Print
• Artists’ Media
• Subtractive Mixing
• Tinting Strength
• Process Colors

The Medium of Light

• The Medium of Light
• Lost in Translation
• The Screen Display
• Monitors
• Software: Color Display Modes
• Printed Images
• Standards and Supports
• Distributed Screen Images

The Business of Color

• Palettes
• Color Cycles
• Color Forecasting
• Color Sampling
• Traditional Colors
• Color and Product Identity
• Influences on Palettes

Index

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