Interaction of color

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1. carpdiemAug 2026
   That's a... surprisingly deep question. I'm actually a physicist by background first, so I got my start doing waaayyy too many calculations with blackbody and emissions spectra.

   Then, back in 2010, when I was just getting into startups, I spent two weeks straight at Powell's in Portland reading through their graphic design section.

   After that, I never got very far away from light or perception... AR/VR -> graphics -> silicon photonics -> physical AI (now).

   I'm still very much learning, but if you like this stuff and want to learn more yourself there's a couple sources I can recommend:

   - Interaction of Color, by Josef Albers. Amazing book, but you really want to get a physical copy.

   - I really like this talk from SciPy 2015 to get a sense of how people work with and talk about color maps in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU

   - This is a really, really thorough (and beautifully illustrated) article on what color spaces are: https://www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/color-spaces-models-...

   - And last, I wrote a very technical blog post a few years back, if you want to see some math on a bunch of this: https://www.usuallypragmatic.com/projects/Generating-Color-T...

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2. BostonFernApr 2025
   See Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color or the recent and more approachable Interacting With Color.
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3. chefandyDec 2023
   I'm a professional designer. You're conflating learning design with learning a tool. Learning to use the tools is the easy part. Learning the fundamentals of design is often still taught in schools with pencils, paper, paint, collage, etc. and you'll almost never find a course on "Photoshop," for example. You might find courses on photo editing, and you might use Photoshop to do layout work for a class on making still composites, but knowing Photoshop doesn't make you a designer in the professional sense any more than knowing Word inside-and-out makes you a writer. Do yourself a favor and read some great technical design books like "Grid Systems," "Thinking With Type," and Alber's "Interaction of Color," as well as more general design books like "the design of everyday things" to get an idea of what design is before you start trying to mimic design with design tools. Developers especially tend to dramatically overestimate their understanding of design, and dramatically underestimate the amount of knowledge required. I think the "graphic design is my passion" meme is terribly reductive, but it is a thing. Formal training isn't magic: I knew a self-taught designer that became the art director for a national magazine. But you bet he read all of those books and dozens more— for every one like him, there's 10k people who gained technical competence with tools and have no idea that they have no technical competence with design, generally. You can quickly get yourself to the point where you're making logos for clients on fiverr who have no idea how to evaluate design, but most of those designers wouldn't even qualify for an internship at a design studio, let alone get contracted for work or an in-house position somewhere.

   Hope this helps.

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4. jlturnerSep 2023
   See Josef Alber’s Interaction of Color for more information and studies of relative color. It’s a fascinating subject and color theory is very useful for UX and getting more bang with less colors. (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300179354/interaction-of...)
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5. LukeBMMNov 2022
   Based in part off Gibson's work, there's also The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. First published as Psychology of Everyday Things in '88, it's arguable whether it counts as "older" but seems pretty timeless conceptually, even if the specific examples may become dated.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

   Edit: Oh, yeah. How about Tufte ('83 for Visual Display of Quantitative Information) and Albers (Interaction of Color in '63). I should think first, then post.

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6. DaubOct 2022
   > Where can I learn about the mad-ass angry part?

   Bruce MacEvay know more about colour theory and history than any man alive: https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/wcolor.html

   Also Color space and its divisions (Kuehni, R. G. 2001) will help you tell the difference between up and down in the color domain (not an easy task in the world of colour).

   My own thoughts...

   Goethe's full text of his `Colour Theory' is effectively a hate letter to Newton. However, that part of the book is rarely translated into English.

   Generally, that whole bunch of romantics/spiritualists brought nothing but fuzziness to the subject of color theory in art. For example, in ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ Kandinsky remarked that `orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow'. Goethe described the colour ‘yellow-red’ as being a favorite of `savage nations' and `impetuous, robust and uneducated men' and Itten himself describes the colours of a stained glass window as offering a `...direct invitation to higher spirituality'. Lovely words, but of little application to confused art students.

   The problem with that hot-head Goethe is that he misunderstood a lot of what Newton was saying. Newton was addressing the physics of colour, whilst Goethe was addressing its application. These (generally) involve two different colour spaces defined by two different sets of antagonistic pairs (RGB/subtractive/light for Newton and RYB/additive/paint for Goethe). These two different ways of understanding the same thing are difficult to reconcile. For example, in RGB black is an absence of light, whilst for the painter's RYB space it is an active element.

   Goethe is often credited with discovering the physiological dimensions of colour (that one colour can influence our perception of another). In fact it was Newton, though he did not pursue it very deeply.

   Goethe had a massive influence on the way art and colour is addressed and I don't believe that art schools will ever recover from that. However, I still respect Goethe for his obsessive approach to the subject. Itten, on the other hand, is a whole bucket of shit. His set of contrasts developed out of his teaching, and he was the living embodiment of a bad art teacher. You have been to art school I guess... you know the type. Charismatic, cultish and mistaken. He required all his students to be vegetarians, and to practice calisthtics at the beginning of class. Unsurprisingly, was a proponent of Mazdaznanism, which was a fire cult.

   There are many errors and inconsistencies in his work. For example, in his book `The Art of Colour' he describes yellow as being ‘lighter’ than blue. This is clearly erroneous, as lightness is independent from hue, and any hue has the potential to be lighter than any other hue. What he is responding to is that the maximum saturation of yellow is reached at a lower lightness value than (for example) blue or green. The annoying thing is that in the same book he recognizes HSL as being the three perceptual dimensions of color! I could fill a book with other mistakes he made.

   You mention Albers. He is someone I have a lot of respect for. Goethe and Itten tried to construct general theories on the subject. Albers was more humble. His book `Interaction of Color' was a set of thoughtful observations, as indeed was his whole body of work 'Homage to the Square'.

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