Color your story.

I Would like to present you some instruments that I use to work with colours. Some helpful books to learn more about story of colours and web site to create a color palettes.

Pantone provides a universal language of color that enables color-critical decisions through every stage of the workflow for brands and manufacturers. More than 10 million designers and producers around the world rely on Pantone products and services to help define, communicate and control color from inspiration to realization – across various materials and finishes for graphics, fashion and product design. All of our color libraries are highly curated and backed by scientific achievability to meet market and manufacturing needs. Our systems are globally available, so when a designer in New York City specifies a certain Pantone Color Number, the manufacturer in Shanghai immediately knows exactly which color they want – and how to achieve it. Even though they may not speak the same language, they both understand the global colors of Pantone.

The designer's Dictionary of Colour di Sean Adams

Sean Adams is a founding partner of the award-winning California design firm AdamsMorioka and has been cited as one of the 40 most important people shaping design internationally. A former AIGA national board member and president of AIGA Los Angeles, he teaches at ArtCenter College of Design and is a frequent lecturer and competition judge. Sean is the coauthor of Logo Design Workbook and Color Design Workbook and author of the series Masters of Design. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

The Designer’s Dictionary of Color provides an in-depth look at 30 colors key to art and graphic design. Organized by spectrum, in color-by-color sections for easy navigation, this book documents each hue with charts showing color range and palette variations. Chapters detail each color’s creative history and cultural associations, with examples of color use that extend from the artistic to the utilitarian—whether the turquoise on a Reid Miles album cover or the avocado paint job on a 1970s Dodge station wagon. A practical and inspirational resource for designers and students alike, The Designer’s Dictionary of Color opens up the world of color for all those who seek to harness its incredible power.

Color hunt you will find different color palettes. Enjoy

Colors is a program to generate your color palette for different projects. Let’ s create your color palette!

Color Lol Created as a fun way to discover interesting color combinations.

Blue: The History of a Color. Pastoureau Michel

What does the colour blue remind you of? The hue has been an important part of art and paintings for centuries.

Go back far enough into art history and you will find that the colour blue - as we know it today - simply did not exist. The ancient Greeks didn’t seem to have a word for it, combining it instead with what we would think of as several different colours, such as red and purple. Homer himself typically described the sea as ‘wine-dark’ rather than calling it blue.

In art, the colour blue was deemed a luxury. In nature, blue pigment is hard to come by in the early days of art and painting there were no immediate materials to make this particular dye with. It wasn’t until the Egyptians started mining and found lapis lazuli that people were able to create art featuring the colour blue. As a semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli was very expensive; it was ground up to make the valuable ultramarine pigment used by artists for centuries to come. Blue was later made by combining metals, but until a method of extracting dye from the leaves of plants was found, blue - was for a long time - seen as a prestigious colour.

Due to its value, the colour blue was used to depict important people in Renaissance and pre-Renaissance eras. The Virgin Mary is most commonly depicted wearing blue as a mark of respect and to make her stand out. Blue became associated with royalty when the monarchy in France began regularly wearing the colour - a fashion trend that was adopted by royals from other countries. In the 12th century it became part of the royal coat of arms of France; paintings of the mythical King Arthur began to show him dressed in blue.

While blue continued to be seen as a prestigious colour in art, the introduction of plant-based dyes for clothes meant that blue became available to the masses. Indigo and wode were made by soaking plant leaves. Working class people were able to don this ‘luxurious’ colour, but artists still struggled to find a cheaper alternative to ultramarine to use in their paintings. Before a decent alternative was found, high quality ultramarine cost more than gold gram for gram.

For centuries, artists tried to find blue colours that would not only look good, but were also cheap and long lasting. Prussian blue was ‘invented’ in 1709 by Johann Jacob Diesbach because of his experimenting with potassium and iron sulphides.

Favoured by painters

This new colour was favoured by many painters. The famous Japanese painting, The Great Wave (1829-1833), uses this new blue. Impressionists used it alongside newly invented blue pigments. Renoir, Turner and Manet regularly used cobalt blue to create many notable paintings. Van Gogh wrote of cobalt blue: ‘There is nothing so beautiful for putting atmosphere around things.’ The Impressionists experimented with the colour and placed it against its complementary colours of orange and yellow.

In the early 20th century, Picasso dedicated a whole era of his painting to the colour blue. His ‘Blue Period’ utilises the emotional and symbolic values of the colour. He painted many monochromatic paintings of beggars, prostitutes and drunks, reflecting his depression following the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas.

Today, blue is used in a great variety of ways. It can be a serious colour, like the blue uniforms of the New York City Police Department; or it can be emotional and used to display sadness or faith. The colour has given its name to a number of movements: the Bluestockings women who campaigned for female education rights were given the name due to the colour of their informal blue hosiery; blues music got its name from its trademark sad and melancholic themes. Although it is a primary colour by all modern accounts, our world had to go a long way to get the great variety of blues we have today

The secret lives of colour by Kassia St Clair

Kassia St. Clair is based in London and is Britain’s bestselling historian under 40. Her first book, The Secret Lives of Colour, is a top-ten bestseller, was selected as Radio 4′s Book of the Week and has been translated into twenty languages.

From scarlet women to imperial purple, from the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, from kelly green to acid yellow, the surprising stories of colour run like a bright thread through our history. The Secret Lives of Colour was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and a Sunday Times top-five bestseller.

Atlante sentimentale dei colori in Italian