| authors |
Norman, Richard B. |
| year |
1990 |
| title |
Color Contrast and CAAD: The Seven Color Contrasts of Johannes Itten |
| source |
The Electronic Design Studio: Architectural Knowledge and Media in the Computer Era [CAAD Futures ‘89 Conference Proceedings / ISBN 0-262-13254-0] Cambridge (Massachusetts / USA), 1989, pp. 469-478 |
| summary |
Computer-aided architectural design is design with color - the monitor of a CAAD system is a display of color, a place where images are produced by color manipulation. The success of these images can be judged by the ability of the colors selected to communicate graphic ideas and to convey graphic information. Color as a visual phenomena intrigued the impressionist painters at the end of the nineteenth century; it was the focus of much attention at the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany. When Johannes Itten was appointed as a Master of Form at the Bauhaus in 1919, he developed "an aesthetic color theory originating in the experience and intuition of a painter". In his definitive work, Itten postulates seven ways to communicate visual information with color. "Each is unique in character and artistic value, in visual, expressive and symbolic effect, and together they constitute the fundamental resource of color design". These seven contrasts provide a lexicon of the methods by which computer images convey graphic information. The colors which form a computer image can be simply manipulated to illustrate these contrasts; today's computers make color manipulation a very simple matter. This paper is composed of short essays about each of these contrasts and how they can guide the selection of appropriate colors to convey visual intent on a picture tube. Considered together the contrasts of Itten provide a fundamental resource for electronic graphic communication. |
| series |
CAAD Futures |
| email |
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| full text |
 file.pdf (598,127 bytes) |
| references |
Content-type: text/plain
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| last changed |
2003/05/16 20:58 |
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