Colour Hunting: How Colour Influences What We Buy, Make and Feel

by Jeanne Tan, Hedwig van Onna, Hanneke Kamphuis

Color plays a vital role in visual experiences. Professionals in design, fashion, architecture, and art are constantly exploring to find good solutions regarding color. In a globalizing world, color requires less time to "read" than any other means of communication. Recent experiments by artists and designers reveal a never-ending fascination with and attraction to color. Research aimed at the urban environment shows how color identifies cultures and can be used to attract attention. Color provides more than a visual experience, however. Scientific studies have proved that other senses, such as touch and taste, are stimulated as well. Projects devoted to well-being and healing provide solid evidence of an increasing interest in color. Colour How Colour Influences What We Buy, Make and Feel presents projects---all richly illustrated with photographs and drawings---that pioneer techniques and experiments with fabrication processes on a small scale, with a do-it-yourself attitude as well as large-scale research projects on paints and coatings, carried out by international companies. The book is divided into three commerce (sell, buy), aesthetics (make), and well-being (feel). Illustrated pages are followed by in-depth case studies and interviews regarding the use of color for these three purposes. Experts explain why color matters in branding and how knowledge of color and its effects determines the selection of colors that designers apply to their work and the materials involved. Colour Hunting also offers lucid insights into the work of international "trend teams." Interviews with well-known professionals—including Issey Miyake, Leatrice Eiseman of the Pantone Color Institute, and Matthias Sauerbruch of Sauerbruch Hutton Architects—highlight the pages of this book. Jeanne Tan has written for many international magazines, including Wallpaper* , i-D , and Metropolis .

264 pages, Paperback

First published August 16, 2011

Reviews

[Am Y · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty interesting. One of the features included talking to a car manufacturer to see which colour was more popular with car owners. The result seemed rather random - there didn't seem to be any particular more-favoured colour which was a bit surprising to me. The book tries to make the case for colour having a large impact on our lives, but ironically, the data presented seems to suggest otherwise (as demonstrated in the car colour example), and that people pick colour quite randomly!