"Free Online Book: - 'Color, Contrast, and Dimension in News Design' "

"Colours, like features, follow the changes of the emotions." - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish Artist

"Color, Contrast, and Dimension in News Design", is a great online resource. It's an interactive color experience combined with useful information and awesome examples and exercises.

Highly Recommended

So how did this book come about?

In 1992, Pegie Stark Adam, worked with The Poynter Institute to develop, Color, Contrast, and Dimension in News Design. This book was used to create an online version, "Color, Contrast, and Dimension in News Design".

You can use the online version as an interactive teaching tool as it explains color theory and shows you how to use it in design through examples and exercises. These exercises are an awesome, hands-on experiences, that are vivid examples of the physiology of color. You, the reader, is able to change colors of various media examples, so that you can discover for yourself how color can change, meaning, mood, and navigation on a page.
This is one of the sites you'll visit many times over.

Sections in the book include:-

• The Power of Color
• The Physiology and Theory of Color
• Color, Contrast and Dimension
• Color on the Web
• Eye-Trac Research
• Bibliography

"Color, Contrast, and Dimension in News Design" also describes the seven color contrasts identified by Johannes Itten (1888-1967), in his books, The Elements of Color and The Art of Color . Itten was a Swiss painter, designer teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus school. He developed the so-called preliminary course which taught students the basics of material characteristics, composition, and color.

The seven color contrasts Itten identified are: -

• Hue
• Light and Dark
• Cool and Warm
• Complementary
• Simultaneous Contrast
• Saturation
• Proportion

The color contrasts are illustrated with great examples in "Color, Contrast, and Dimension in News Design" .
This is a useful reference.

You can learn from a Master of Color.

Johannes Itten has written awesome books about color that will help anyone master color. You can buy his books at Amazon.com.

"The Elements of Color"

"The Art of Color"

"The Color Star"