Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition

"Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color was newly released by Yale University Press to mark the 50th anniversary of the original publication. It is a truly beautiful book. As a book designer, I absolutely get suckered into the the beauty of a book. Mind you, I didn’t have this particular edition when I was in art school, when I was first introduced to Josef and Anni Albers . The colour exercises inside the book take me back to my student days, only they have been redone for this edition—really beautifully! This is foundational colour theory such as I studied when I was at Parsons School of Design and I love it so much. It just makes me happy. “What differentiates us from other forms of design is that we typically design to solve communications problems” Colour is one of those things which can be incredibly trendy. It can get highjacked by trends. Certain palettes come and go with the fashion, Pantone has the ‘colour of the year’, fashion designers talk about which is the ‘in colour’ for the season. Sometimes when you look at pictures of yourself from a long time ago, the two things that likely stand out are your hair, and the colours that you were wearing at the time. What I love about Albers is that his theories are not trendy. They are scientifically grounded, and often mind-blowing, as the examples in the book illustrate. Adjacent colours, though identical, can appear very differently to the eye due to their placement. In my previous position at Oxford University Press , I had a staff of 45 designers and art directors. I’ve been managing designers for a really long time. Sometimes I had to have ‘that conversation’ with them—that graphic design is not a fine art. It’s a craft, it’s a trade, it’s a skill. Hence we have The Graphic Artists Guild, and not, for example, a salon. What differentiates graphic design from fine art is that you have to solve a problem and you have to solve it for a particular audience, or indeed almost always for at least two audiences. One is the audience of the deciders, the gatekeepers or the people who hired you. In addition though, you need to communicate effectively with the ultimate audience who they gatekeepers want to reach, right? This is where theory can be inordinately helpful. Albers does not follow trends. We designers often hear things from our audience such as ‘I don’t like the colour yellow’. You hear that a lot when you work as a book designer. With this book I’m able to tell the client, very objectively, well, this is how the colour yellow solves your specific communication problem. I appreciate that as a tool in my toolkit."