Designer's Color Manual: The Complete Guide to Color Theory and Application
by Tom Fraser and Adam Banks
Chronicle Books
List Price: $29.95

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Reviewed June 2005
By Daniel Fogg

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To be an effective artist whether you are an oil painter or digital designer requires mastery of the age-old world of color theory. Unfortunately very few books cover the subject in an engaging or comprehensive manner. Thankfully, Chronicle books steps up the plate with the all-new Designer's Color Manual by Tom Fraser and Adam Banks -perhaps the only book you'll ever need to buy relating to color theory. This text is very complete with sections on human biological perceptions of color, color terminology, history, culture, mathematics and much more. The content is aided by plenty of excellent graphics, photos and diagrams with accurately reproduced color printing. I found the "Seeing Color Differently" section particularly interesting as it details the nature of color blindness in humans and even shows an example of the Ishihara images used to test for color blindness. For those of you interested in package design and retail graphics there's also a section on "Color at the Point of Sale" which discusses merchandising and marketing impact through color.

The text is up-to-date including sections on digital applications of color management and color calibration. The information is nicely balanced with sections that cover traditional art and mediums (painting) as well as modern theories (branding, marketing, lifestyle design). Some of the latter sections on digital color turn into software tutorials and are a little underwritten. The software specific topics were probably better left to individual books on Photoshop and Illustrator than can spend an entire chapter on the subject instead of a couple of pages.

Pros: Very complete coverage on the subject of color theoy.
Cons: Some software-specific sections are best left to a tutorial-based book.

Final Verdict: Must Buy!