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Pattern and Palette Sourcebook 2: A Complete Guide to Choosing the Perfect Color and Pattern in Design
A plethora of patterns and palettes! This hardworking reference book is the second volume in Rockport's Pattern and Palette series. Like the first, it is an invaluable tool for art directors, designers, and students working in the fashion, product, and graphic design fields, as well as anyone in the business of visual communication. With close to 1,000 new patterns, Pattern and Palette Sourcebook 2 is a desktop library of colors and patterns that address the professional's needs in working with harmonies and contrasts. Divided into six unique style sections, the book provides readers with fifteen appropriate colors for each section, which are then incorporated into twenty-five different patterns shown in six or eight color variations each. This enables readers to see the dramatic effect colors have in design and helps them understand how to use color effectively. The book also demonstrates ways of creating designs that are distinctly unique from one another yet hold together in a group. Also included is an interactive CD ROM that contains the patterns featured. Users can choose patterns, experiment with colors, and print out a sample of the patterns for reference.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 9, 2016
I love the idea of this book very much. You get a palette group from which smaller palettes are made, and then patterns in which that smaller palette is used. It's a great inspiration tool, one I will probably use a fair bit. There are many colors in the book that I just love, and many palettes that were beautiful.
However, the book and, more specifically, the CD with it could have been better designed. I would have liked to see a better use of the patterns. The patterns didn't have a range of colors applied to them, but rather used the same number of colors. It would have been nicer and more useful to see two colors used here, three here, and four here, rather than just two here and all five or six here. I also would have liked to see the RGB values presented with the colors (or even just listed at the back of the book). As a digital artist, I use the RGB values far more than I do the CMYK values.
The CD was also poorly designed. The tool itself is a brilliant idea- getting to play around with the colors in the patterns yourself- but since it uses RBG to select colors and the book has only CMYK values, I have to get an extra tool to convert the CMYK values to RBG values to even use the palettes presented in the books. There's also no indication of what color you've selected other than the RGB values in the boxes, and that's probably helpful only to a very select few. The last issue I had was that some of the lines in the patterns were extremely small or thin, and since you're expected to click the part of the image where you want to change the color, this presented an issue.
I'm going to keep the book and enjoy it, but, honestly, if I had known what I do about it before I bought it, I probably would have skipped buying it. There are books that do the same things as this one does, but that have done it better.
However, the book and, more specifically, the CD with it could have been better designed. I would have liked to see a better use of the patterns. The patterns didn't have a range of colors applied to them, but rather used the same number of colors. It would have been nicer and more useful to see two colors used here, three here, and four here, rather than just two here and all five or six here. I also would have liked to see the RGB values presented with the colors (or even just listed at the back of the book). As a digital artist, I use the RGB values far more than I do the CMYK values.
The CD was also poorly designed. The tool itself is a brilliant idea- getting to play around with the colors in the patterns yourself- but since it uses RBG to select colors and the book has only CMYK values, I have to get an extra tool to convert the CMYK values to RBG values to even use the palettes presented in the books. There's also no indication of what color you've selected other than the RGB values in the boxes, and that's probably helpful only to a very select few. The last issue I had was that some of the lines in the patterns were extremely small or thin, and since you're expected to click the part of the image where you want to change the color, this presented an issue.
I'm going to keep the book and enjoy it, but, honestly, if I had known what I do about it before I bought it, I probably would have skipped buying it. There are books that do the same things as this one does, but that have done it better.
May 3, 2009
Nice book about colour and pattern in design. Nice collection of patterns and colours schemes to get you inspired. You will be reading or looking at this book for years like almost all pattern and design books
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews