Customer Reviews

A Book of Colors

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fantastic resource for anyone designing in colour. I do mostly online design and use this book every day. It is a specialised colour combination scale based on research done by the author.

Pick a base colour and see its combinations, what they mean to most people and where they are typically used. Awesome stuff!

This book and its companion, "Color Image Scale," are excellent sources of palette ideas for web work. (If you buy one, buy both.) As an amateur designer, I found their treatment of the emotional impact of color groupings to be enlightening and thought inspiring. On the down side, they don't provide CMYK or RGB values--a minor inconvenience.

This book was recommended to me by a friend who designs rugs and is an architect as well. I bought it for my own use as an interior designer and to help me with paint colors and overall color scheming. It is a great device for getting a feel from your client of what colors he/she prefers. It's a wonderful gift for people in the trade.

You already have a large library about color. We're painters and quite frankly, we're interested in our tools. Color is only one of our many tools we use to construct a painting. I've already recommended in an earlier ArtsyFartsy Newsletter "Powercolor" by Caroline Jasper - get this book. And now... add this one.

This book is kind of a hoot! "A Book of Colors" by Shigenobu Kobayashi. It's a tiny book featuring an endless offering of certain colors combined with other specific colors to evoke an emotional response. The author has conveniently arranged color combinations into "mood categories" such as Dynamic * Tender * Cool * Mature, etc. Originally I felt it was more for designers and the psychology of colorful products and interiors. I wanted to try out these colors to the text in a painting. Could I combine certain colors to get a specific reaction from the viewer? If I follow all the color combinations from this book, I'll be painting forever! This book is more of a novelty and a fun one to have around for ideas.

A book of colors was probably wonderful when it was first published; my copy is a 1987 edition. Since then, the world of color books has exploded, and many of the newer ones provide bigger samples, and RGB, Pantone, or Hex keys so that you can get the color right exactly.

There's an interesting little section in the middle, explaining how the color charts came to be, but you have to read one of the author's other works (see Colorist) to take the color quiz yourself and see what your "favorite" palettes are.

The real key to this book? "Little." It is tiny. 5x7. It will fit in your watercolor daypack just fine; way better than some of the newer books. But that doesn't leave much room for swatches.