Reviewed by : Marjie Courtis

Understanding Color is a valuable book with application far beyond its primary target market of design professionals.

Author Holtzschue uses the language of color so clearly and cleverly that its concepts become accessible to anyone with an interest in color.

Holtzschue's book skips some of the physics of color and its origins in light, with limited reference to the wavelengths, frequency and energy of individual colors. But if you prefer a little more detail than her chapter A Little Light On The Subject, it's readily found elsewhere.

Holtzschue presents the History of Color, beginning with Newton and his famous prism, which split white light into the range of visible colors. Then she moves to Goethe, whose interests lie more in the experience of color in the human world. Moving into more recent watersheds in the theory of color, she cites the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s as the impetus for a definitive break between color as science and color as art and aesthetics.

In her chapter on The Human Element she describes color as a sensation, impacted by our physiology, our psychology and the "instability" of color itself.

A whole chapter discusses The Instability of Colors, that is, the way a color can change in different conditions. This leads to one of her fundamental assertions that "a skilled colorist exploits the instabilities of color and uses them to create interest and vitality in design."

That chapter goes on to explain how designers can work with this instability to create new impressions, applying concepts like color composition, placement, equilibrium, simultaneous contrast, afterimage and contrast reversal, complementary contrast and ground subtraction.

The book deals with a number of other techniques that designers can use to create illusion, impression, harmony, dissonance or high impact from their use of color. There are stunning examples, carefully rendered on the printed page, to demonstrate what she says.

Holtzschue makes the reader very aware that the impression of color varies between a tangible object, a printed page and a screen. So naturally she devotes several chapters to Tools of the Trade for designers, in the print and screen worlds. where special techniques need to be applied to achieve consistent and intended color perception between different media.

The final chapter of the book on The Business of Color is interesting to the professional designer or interested consumer, as it explains and defines the concepts of color palettes, color cycles, color forecasting, the color industry and the use of color in sales and marketing.

Understanding Color is grounded firmly in a historical context. Like Goethe, Holtzschue's emphasis is more on the use of color than the source of color in light.

Like the Bauhaus movement, she knows the importance of attributes of color in perception, the contrasts of colour hue, value, saturation warmth and coolness, complementary and simultaneous contrast and the contrast of extension.

And Holtzschue herself brings the Study of Color well into the era of recent and future media.

Understanding Color is surely a book for anyone interested in or enchanted by color.

Understanding Color (Fourth Edition) by Linda Holtzschue.
Wiley 2011.
ISBN 978-0-470-38135-9