Designer's Guide to Color 5 (Bk. 5) (Paperback)

by Shibukawa (Author), Takahashi (Author) "As lightness values increase, the variations in color hues (yellow, red, blue) become subtle..." (more)
Key Phrases: Mostly Deep, Art Deco

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Another in the bestselling Designer's Guide to Color collection, this indispensable reference contains extensive descriptions for creating colors that convey emotions or impressions, and acts as a guide for making up new ones. Ranging from earthy color combinations to cool metallic combinations and deep, vivid tones, Designer's Guide to Color 5 will be essential for designers or anyone making a color choice. Full color throughout.

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (May 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877018782
• ISBN-13: 978-0877018780
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,100,292 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Where'd my special K go?, May 25, 2003

By	tomfromboston - See all my reviews

One of the things I hate and find irritating about this book is its complete lack of utilizing the color black. In fact, of all the hundreds of color combinations contained in this little book, the color black (K) is completely missing. And that, contrary to what some people might think, is an extremely important color in CMYK printing. It also lists all color combos in YMC order, which I've never seen before in any color book. It gets very confusing when trying to input the values into any program, as they are all set up to take CMYK in that order. But you don't have to worry about getting the K value--the authors just left it out. Quite unforgivable. I also found the color combos shown here to be extremely UN-complementary. I've had more than one client tell me, after showing them a couple of designs using these color combos, that the schema looked "awful" or just plain "ugly." I did too, but since my confidence in color coordination is not that high, I needed second opinions. Which I got. So I put it on the back shelf and let it gain 10%K dust in the 100%K recesses where I hope to never find or use it again. There are just too many books out there that are simply better.

6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Colors matched, May 12, 2000

By	Emin Bakioglu (Orange County, CA) - See all my reviews

This is a very useful designers reference book. I wish that they've listed the colors in the order of C-M-Y-K instead of Y-M-C-K, it gets confusing when I want to plug in the numbers to my color palette. Timeless color combinations. Very useful even in the year 2000, even though it has been almost ten years since it got published. Pantone combinations would be helpful for next publications (if they haven't done it yet) Thanks for your guidance when I get stuck with no creative color ideas.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good guide of color combinations, July 23, 2001

By	Eric Londaits (Buenos Aires, Argentina) - See all my reviews

Very good, if not thorough, color reference, with very good color combinations (color charts are included as well). Perhaps a bigger variety of "moods" or "styles" (as the combinations are classified) could have made this book more of a definitive reference.

The prose that accompanies each chapter and tries to bring some rationality to the choices of colors and explain the creation of new combinations is somewhat shallow, and I found it quite confusing for the use of terms left unexplained, and a somewhat clunky translation from the Japanese.