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.
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
1 Attributes of Colour Perceptions
This section concerns the attributes of our colour perceptions (hue, lightness, chroma etc.), considered individually and as dimensions of perceptual colour spaces.
This section concerns the physical basis of the colours we perceive as belonging to light and to objects, including colour in nature.
This section concerns the biological basis of colour perceptions, from retinal anatomy and physiology to conscious experience.
4 Colour Measurement and Digital Colour
This section concerns additive mixture, colorimetry, digital colour spaces, and additive technology in graphics, photography, and video.
This section concerns pigments and dyes, colour behaviour in ideal subtractive and actual paint mixture, and the colour technology of paints for fine art and the built environment, printing inks, film, and textiles.
6 Colour in Visual Art, Design and Industry
This section concerns the application of colour in all aspects of visual art, design and industry.
7 Colour Naming and Cultural Associations
This section concerns colour naming in different languages and also cultural associations and symbolism of colour.
This section includes overviews of the historical development of colour knowledge and beliefs as well as historical primary sources available online.
9 General Colour Sites and Texts
This section includes educational and reference texts and sites with significant coverage of many of the preceding aspects of colour, even if there is a focus on one aspect.