Why yellow isn’t yellow – fascinating primer on how screens change the way our color vision works. Complement with the science of why the color pink doesn’t exist and this 1938 black-and-white film on how color vision works.
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What is color? An animated scientific explanation.
Also see Goethe on the psychology of color, this vintage animated explanation of how color vision works and neuroscientist Mark Changizi’s fascinating The Vision Revolution.
His And Hers Colors by artist and scientist Stephen Von Worley depicts the 2,000 most commonly-used color names by gender, based on the results of XKCD’s color name survey.
“Going off of unique frequencies, there are more colors in a rainbow than there are stars in the Universe or atoms in your body, but that goes far beyond what we can perceive. Your imperfect eye can (probably) only discern about a million distinct colors when you view a rainbow, or anything else, for that matter.”
Literary color palettes inspired by famous authors, a clever teaser for Pantone’s new book. Pictured here, French Country inspired by Gustave Flaubert.
Table of Physiological Colors Both Mixt and Simple by Richard Waller, 1686 – a predecessor to Goethe’s famous color wheel from Theory of Colours. Waller’s table provided a cross-reference for colors one might find in nature. If a shade didn’t match exactly, he proposed, it was a simple matter of locating where on the table’s color-continuum that shade might fall.
[Blue] has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful — but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.
Goethe on the psychology of color and emotion, 1810
What’s better than Pantone planters and vases? Little.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of the excellent Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, explains the curious neurological wire-crossing of synesthesia. Complement with a synesthetic person’s first-hand account of the experience.
XKCD’s map of color for English speakers, part of a fascinating read on how colors names emerged in different cultures and began to affect our perception of the world.
