Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
A COOLER IMAGE
on the left-hand page of this brochure spread—with blue-green and pale violet
tones—contrasts with the warmth of the wood in the image on the right-hand page. The contrast
is important to help add interest, as both images share a repeating pattern of linear, curving, and
angular elements.
Not From Here
United States
Color Relationships
Since the fifteenth century, artists and scientists have been creat-
ing methods for organizing color perception in visual models. A color model helps a
designer see these relationships for planning color ideas. Of these, the most common
is the color wheel, developed by Albert Munsell, a British painter and scientist. Mun-
sell's color wheel is a circular representation of hue—the differences in wavelength that
distinguish blue from yellow from red—modified along two axes that describe the col-
or's darkness or lightness (its value) and its relative brilliance (its saturation). Johannes
Itten, a Bauhaus master at Weimar, Germany, in the 1920s, posited a color sphere—a
three-dimensional model that integrates the value scale of Munsell's color wheel into a
globe—in his landmark topic
The Art of Color,
published in 1961. Both models focus
on hue as color's defining aspect, radiating at full intensity around the outside of a cir-
cular form and decreasing in intensity toward the center. In Itten's sphere, the decrease
in intensity toward the center of the solid globe is the result of mixing hues that are situ-
ated opposite each other (as they are on Munsell's color wheel) and results in a cancel-
ling out toward a neutral.
These color models were developed to describe how color
