Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Adams Media (2013), Edition: 1, 176 pages
Description
Organized by the colors of the rainbow, a design expert and writer looks at the cultural associations with and connections between colors.
User reviews
LibraryThing member DavidWineberg
Remarkably flat for a book on color
For someone who designs for a living, Jude Stewart surprises by publishing a book that is ironically uncolorful. It is chock full of blocky text, consisting mostly of folk tales, clichés, pop science and pop culture that mention a color. It gets tedious; there is
There are far better books that cover the same territory, only infinitely more innovatively. They are far more engaging, far better laid out, and much more useful than this one. The surprise here is how disappointing it is. Design is all but absent.
For someone who designs for a living, Jude Stewart surprises by publishing a book that is ironically uncolorful. It is chock full of blocky text, consisting mostly of folk tales, clichés, pop science and pop culture that mention a color. It gets tedious; there is
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nothing breaking it up. There are no examples, no illustrations, no photos, no swatches to show how dramatic that particular color really is – after she spends a paragraph telling us just that. What there is are descriptions in plain English, in black text, in plain block form. Plus references to other pages in the book where the same phrase is explained, underlined in a color. About the only substantial color are the two page spreads that begin each chapter – each a color, of course. They list all the anecdotes you’re about to read over a timeline. Not very useful or inspired. Occasionally there is a page dedicated to a quote, and the quote is on a color background, with maybe a simple, stock, one color image like a raindrop or a pail.There are far better books that cover the same territory, only infinitely more innovatively. They are far more engaging, far better laid out, and much more useful than this one. The surprise here is how disappointing it is. Design is all but absent.
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LibraryThing member P_Spiegelman
A gem of a book. Jude Stewart basically use one of culture's greatest "commons"—color—to radically re-invent the genre of the commonplace book, that volume of idiosyncratic, idiosyncratically compiled knowledge par excellence. The knowledge here is perfectly proverbial, a vast expanse of fact,
She also clearly loves language, and the visual focus ought not conceal the fact that Stewart writes as well as she sees. Her pen is swift, salty, and often hilarious. The compact, aphoristic structure of the text, one of her most important conceits, often pressures the words into prose poems full of sensuous felicity: on one page, brown "prunes sweat in hot water"; on another, "the queen's power sweeps pinkly across the globe". For all the fine books on design and visual culture out there, very few are actually so well-written, and savor language so deftly.
Apart from the prose, probably the most striking aspect of the book is its visually driven style and structure. Stewart clearly worked closely with the fabulous graphic designer Oliver Munday to produce a fine, intensely collaborative piece of design: the book *works*, just like a well-designed lamp or chair, and is similarly thought-through down to the finest detail. The meticulously executed cross-references, filling the margins of every page, may be the most impressive device. They're also the coolest updating of the commonplace genre: the book's contents, otherwise torn from a thousand sundry sources, are being constantly knitted back together, into configurations alternately fateful and absurd. This anarchic playfulness nicely counters the book's patient tour through the rainbow. Pink bleeds into red of course, but also, through "Nantucket red" and the "crisp aggression of the office", into the "gray queens" of Wall Street eight chapters later. At any given point, Stewart explodes the obviousness of the inherited categories, and keeps color unruly.
A last point: as the hard copy becomes an ever-rarer bird, one comes infrequently upon a book which is so unabashedly, satisfyingly ... booky. "Roy G. Biv" is a beautifully crafted object, inseparable from the pleasure of feeling its weighty squareness in your hands, turning its pages, scanning the subtle shifts in hue and font and topic, flipping upon the witty, minimalist full-color spreads. At the same time, this is not one of those scene-chewing kitchen-sink picture books, desperate to cram in every stock photograph it can. Munday is a disciplined stylist here, and Stewart's equal. Both registers, word and image, thrive not on noise but on exactitude and elegance; Munday's skewed icons harmonize perfectly with Stewart's eccentric classifications. The result is a lovely device for opening, reading, and wandering. Let's hope they pair up again, and soon.
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anecdote, legend, myth, and wish from countless cultures and epochs. It's the kind of knowledge which, regardless of time and place, tries to pin down otherwise slippery and unknowable phenomena: how a color comes to feel "natural" to its subject, how it sutures itself to the silliest and gravest things in life; how the abstractions of light-waves come to actually mean, and mean so differently depending on when and where. Fastidiously researched, Stewart's book is a kind of meta-compilation of such knowledge, and like any author of a good commonplace book, she appears to compile, connect, and curate from a depthless, almost obsessive love of the topic.She also clearly loves language, and the visual focus ought not conceal the fact that Stewart writes as well as she sees. Her pen is swift, salty, and often hilarious. The compact, aphoristic structure of the text, one of her most important conceits, often pressures the words into prose poems full of sensuous felicity: on one page, brown "prunes sweat in hot water"; on another, "the queen's power sweeps pinkly across the globe". For all the fine books on design and visual culture out there, very few are actually so well-written, and savor language so deftly.
Apart from the prose, probably the most striking aspect of the book is its visually driven style and structure. Stewart clearly worked closely with the fabulous graphic designer Oliver Munday to produce a fine, intensely collaborative piece of design: the book *works*, just like a well-designed lamp or chair, and is similarly thought-through down to the finest detail. The meticulously executed cross-references, filling the margins of every page, may be the most impressive device. They're also the coolest updating of the commonplace genre: the book's contents, otherwise torn from a thousand sundry sources, are being constantly knitted back together, into configurations alternately fateful and absurd. This anarchic playfulness nicely counters the book's patient tour through the rainbow. Pink bleeds into red of course, but also, through "Nantucket red" and the "crisp aggression of the office", into the "gray queens" of Wall Street eight chapters later. At any given point, Stewart explodes the obviousness of the inherited categories, and keeps color unruly.
A last point: as the hard copy becomes an ever-rarer bird, one comes infrequently upon a book which is so unabashedly, satisfyingly ... booky. "Roy G. Biv" is a beautifully crafted object, inseparable from the pleasure of feeling its weighty squareness in your hands, turning its pages, scanning the subtle shifts in hue and font and topic, flipping upon the witty, minimalist full-color spreads. At the same time, this is not one of those scene-chewing kitchen-sink picture books, desperate to cram in every stock photograph it can. Munday is a disciplined stylist here, and Stewart's equal. Both registers, word and image, thrive not on noise but on exactitude and elegance; Munday's skewed icons harmonize perfectly with Stewart's eccentric classifications. The result is a lovely device for opening, reading, and wandering. Let's hope they pair up again, and soon.
Show Less
LibraryThing member circeus
I was disappointed with the book. Though the content are not exactly uninteresting (such as the association of Grey with hope after the invention of printing), Stewart utterly fails to cover a number of the most classical associations, such as green with, appropriately enough, hope. However, the
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organization of the book is exceedingly frustrating. The idea of color underlining cross-references is cute, but the density of them, caused by the complete vacuity and irrelevance of 90% of them (not counting those that are outright not aimed at the right pages to begin with!) become tedious within a few pages. It doesn't help that the worse offenders, such as chinese green hats connected to every single references to clothes or fashion imaginable reoccur so often they become almost predictable (almost only because the connection can and will get ridiculously tenuous). Show Less
Language
Original language
English
Physical description
7.46 x 7.33 inches
ISBN
1608196135 / 9781608196135