I had a very long flight today and arrived in Taipei about 27 hours after I left my home in Leeds at 5am this morning. I am here for the AIC colour conference (sun-tues). Staying in the Grand hotel which certainly lives up to its name. Very impressive.
There is now an official MATLAB page for our MATLAB colour book. See here.
The AIC (International Colour Association) released its annual report for 2012 and you can download it here. If you are interested in #colour or even #color then I urge you to have a look. There are reports form the various countries that are part of AIC and I am sure you will find something to interets you.
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.
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.
Promotional video for the School of Design at Leeds – please take a look
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZSFkewV-ZY
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.
If you are looking for inspiration for a colour scheme then you could do worse than look at the Kuler web site.
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.
I heard a rumour that Amazon is to launch a full-colour kindle later this year (2012) based on the E ink display. That would be most welcome.