Sometimes we just have to stop looking ahead, and look up once in a while. This was what I saw when I looked up at Changi airport, a snap of the check-in counter roof, snapped some months ago.

I wonder where the interior designer got the inspiration from. Hm… roaches? :)

I saw this book when I was hanging out in library@orchard. It was displayed on top of a bookshelf. The colours of the book cover were so vibrant and eye-catching that it was hard to ignore; they justify the book title, Colour Management. Judging a book from its cover, I trusted this book to be a good one. I have just finished reading it and I am not disappointed.

I don’t have have a graphic-design degree, thus I had not seriously studied about colours. My colour judgement was merely from my gut, feeling and common sense. So this book is the first one that seriously exposed me to the amazing world of colours. Seriously…be forwarned, this book is really serious about colours.

What I like about this book is, it starts with basics, the colour jargons (okay, may be not really basics, as some of the terms may still be hard to be visualized by beginners), then it goes deep into the topics, and the authors would also repeat some the important points again, so that we will remember.

For a start, you are thrown with the terminology of colour for 82 pages. Then it gets serious about basic colour theories, the creation of colour wheels, colour readability and legibility, colour calibration and overprinting, colour prepress and printing and the last chapter, the behavioural effects of colour.

When I finished reading this book, not only I understood more about colours, but I also felt like I was ready to perform a minor eye surgery. I learned how our eyes interpret colours, starting from the light, going through the cornea, then through the pupil and the iris, and straight into the retina, sending signals to the rods and cones, and finally interpreted by fovea and triggering signals to our brain for the visual interpretation.

Holy cow, I wasn’t even sure the difference between pupil and iris before that. It also teaches you about analogous colours, complimentary colours, harmonious colours, tinting, shading, scaling, split complementary, monochromatic, achromatic, the colour theories (substractive, additive and 3-D), colour temperature, colour mixing, colour toning, the list goes on.

Since it covers so much details, this book may not be so suitable for beginners, but it’s definitely a serious book for designers, be it web, product, environmental or fashion designers, or any nuts like me who would like to get serious about colours.

p.s. The extra explanations, diagrams, and examples on the bottom third of each page are really useful.