The Book of Color

Working with and thinking about color is often a 2 dimensional on-screen exercise. When Colour Studio is working to design color for an architectural elevation or  on a floor plan our  creative staff has spent hours staring at sliders and numbers  tweaking and adjusting. Color starts out looking like this:

But artist Tauba Auerbach has inflated that flat field in to the RGB Colorspace Atlas.The atlas is several 8 in cube hard bound books which, when the pages are turned, fades through each color axis. The atlas contains every printable color.

The RGB Colorspace Atlas | Image by Brittany Schall

The Atlas makes tangible and manually accessible something we usually only experience with our eyes and the intermediary of color theory. These objects transform color in to a physical presence in space. Replacing the obsession with indexical color numbers like the hex code fdfcf3  the atlas relies on an older slower form of discovery: browsing.   Designboom describes the details of the collaboration:

"American artist Tauba Auerbach presents the 8 x 8 x 8-inch hard-back cubes illustrating the RGB color scheme in a page-by-page medium. A digital offset print on paper with airbrushed cloth cover and book edges create a colorful reference volume of all the colors in existence. the special binding was co-designed by the artist herself in collaboration with Daniel E. Kelm, and were printed at Wide Awake Garage, an independent bookbinder."

RGB COLORSPACE ATLAS - Blue Axis from Jonathan Turner on Vimeo.
This is a simulation of one volume in a set of three books by Tauba Auerbach.
each volume / 3632 pages
2011
Animation by Jonathan Turner

- Emily Eifler, Writer, Colour Studio
- Jill Pilaroscia, Principal, Colour Studio