Colour Online

Welcome to my Colour Online link pages, a listing of about five hundred colour-related links that are free to the general public. This collection began around 2007 as a rarely visited page on my teaching website on which I would record interesting links as I came across them, mainly for my own benefit and to be able to find them again quickly for students. I've recently done some work organizing and expanding the list as part of my contribution to the Colour Literacy Project, an international educational initiative jointly undertaken by the Inter-Society Color Council and the International Colour Association to provide age-appropriate colour curricula and state-of-the-art resources for teachers across science, art and industry. Every effort has been made to select sound information from the mass of disinformation about colour on the internet, but some allowance has to be made for that fact that very few resources on colour aimed at a general audience are completely free from misconceptions.

I'm still adding entries, annotations and images, but if you know of any important additional links reflecting a modern understanding of colour and likely to interest artists and designers please send me your suggestions using the form at the bottom of the page. (No red-yellow-blue, primary-secondary-tertiary "colour theory" thank you, except for the historical section!). This website complements my other outreach website, The Dimensions of Colour, an account of the dimensions of colour and light perception, written for painters using either traditional or digital media, also begun in 2007.

David Briggs,

May 2020


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1 Basic Colour Attributes

          • Glossaries

          • What is a Colour?

          • Attributes of Perceived Colour

          • Hue, Lightness and Chroma

          • Hue and Blackness/Whiteness/Chromaticness

2 The Physical Basis of Colour

          • Some Definitions

          • Websites and Videos

          • Online and Downloadable Programs

3 Colour Vision

          • Anatomy and Physiology of Colour Vision

          • Phenomena of Colour Perception

          • Interactive Programs

4 Light Mixing Processes

          • Websites

          • Apps

5 Colorants and Colorant Mixing

          • Pigments and Paints

          • Subtractive Mixing Theory

          • Paint Mixing

6 Colour Order Systems

          • Overviews

          • CIE Colorimetry

          • Munsell System

          • Natural Colour System (NCS)

          • Digital Colour Specification and Spaces

          • Other Systems

          • Interactive Online and Downloadable Programs

7 Digital Colour Technology

8 Colour in Art and Design

          • Websites

          • Colour and Light in Representational Painting

          • Colour in Architecture

          • Colour in Cinema

          • Colour Scheme Generators

9 Colour and Culture

          • Overviews

          • Colour Naming

          • Colour Symbolism

10 History of Colour Studies

          • Historical Texts Online (selected)

          • Archives and Anthologies of Historical Texts on Colour

          • History of Theories of Colour

          • History of Applied Colour

11 Colour Education

          • History of Colour Education

          • Textbooks on Colour

          • Outreach Websites

12 Further Information

          • Glossaries

          • Blogs

          • Forums

          • Link Pages

          • Archives of Scientific Papers

          • Videos

          • Colour Associations