Name: Interaction of Color
ISBN: 9780300179354

Josef Albers

An experimental approach to the study and teaching of color is comprised of exercises in seeing color action and feeling color relatedness before arriving at color theory.

50th Anniversary Edition

Interaction of Color

Eva Decker

Interaction of Color is comprised of two halves. The first half of the book contains the main text and is printed in black and white. The second half consists of color “plates” which showcase specific examples from the main text, along with some supplementary text of its own. This format requires keeping two bookmarks—one for your position in the reading, and one for the corresponding illustrations some 100 pages later. For a book devoted to the study of color, this is baffling and mildly infuriating.

I suspect this format is held over from the book’s original 1963 edition, when printing a full color book may have been prohibitively expensive. To blindly adopt this design over 50 years later is an unfortunate oversight.

Albers’s writing seems directed more toward teachers like Josef Albers and less toward people like Josef Albers’s students. It instructs readers why colored paper is best for classroom projects (mixing paints and textures is distracting), why to restrict a certain project to vertical strips of color only (shapes are distracting), and which brands of acetate sheets to buy (“Zip-a-tone,” “Artype,” and “Cello-tak”).

Like a true academic, Albers’s tone is pretentious and dry. Oddly, he seems to love inserting line breaks at arbitrary points. He may fancy Interaction of Color a work of poetry, but I’d really rather read text with a predictable line-length.

Form and format aside, the content is quite good. At its original publishing, Albers’s work was revolutionary, and it still holds its own in 2017. Interaction presents novel ways of interpreting and applying color, it’s opened my mind to colors and color combinations I may have dismissed previously. If you’re a designer, Interaction of Color is a book worth adding to your collection.

Regrettably, nowhere in the 50th anniversary is there a mention of how to apply these techniques to screen design for digital designers like myself.

I would love to see an updated edition—or perhaps a new book entirely from one of Albers’s students—which corrects the issues listed above, goes beyond staged classroom examples to point out meaningful uses of color in the real world, delves into the differences between print and screen, and overall makes the book more practical and approachable without losing Albers’s pioneering spirit.

Interaction of Color 50th Anniversary Edition