Category Archives: professional

The evolution of colour in design from the 1950s to today


I am editor for an academic journal about colour – the Journal of the International Colour Association. We just published our 8th issue today which is a special issue containing some of the best papers from the VI conference of the Italian Colour Group. Readers of this blog will probably particularly enjoy the paper by Francesca Valan on The evolution of colour in design from the 1950s to today. Valan introduces the notion of chromatic cycles and observes that the higher the chroma the shorter the duration of the trend. Some interesting predictions are made about the popularity of certain colours in the near future. To see this and all the other papers from this issue click here.

measuring skin colour

I came across an article in the Daily Mail about a phone app that can be used to measure skin colour. It is produced by Fujitsu. Trying to measure colour using a digital camera is difficult. The RGB values you obtain depend upon the lighting and the settings of the camera and even on the make of the camera. Technically, we say that the RGB values are device-dependent. Fujitsu have got around this by using a mask (see picture) that contains some standard colours that are skin tones. Presumably the app grabs the RGB values of the standard colours and then uses these to make an adjustment to the captured RGB values of the actual skin. It’s very clever and I am impressed.

colour forecasting in real time

An interesting project, Color Forecast, has been developed by Pedro Cruz and runs feeds from high definition cameras in Milan, Paris and Antwerp to track the colour of fashions worn across the cities.The software analyzes the passing colors and shows in real time which colors are worn most often, then the colors are compiled into an infographic to see how trends evolve. For further information see here.

CGIV Amsterdam

The latest CGIV (European Conference on Colour in Graphics, Imaging, and Vision) conference is taking place in Amsterdam now (6-9 May 2012). CGIV covers a wide range of topics related to colour and visual information, including color science, computational color, color in computer graphics, color reproduction, color vision/psychophysics, color image quality, color image processing, and multispectral color science. For further details see here.