A dose of color from PBS!

Color lovers unite! We found you an excellent video this week. In the last year PBS has made great strides in producing fantastic educational and informative online video with YouTube channels like PBS Off Book and Idea channel.  To our delight  they made a great video all about color. 

It starts off with an introduction to color theory from Tomas Bosket, a professor who, instead of tightening his students ideas about color into the preformed boxes of historical color theory,  teaches them the principles and then encourages them to create new color wheels and charts of color combinations. It encourages an imaginative and creatively active experience of color.

The show goes on to cover the wide range of our psychological associations with color from universal, cultural and personal perspectives. Universal color reactions are things that affect all of us no matter where we are from in the world: the physiological trigger of an increased heart beat, increased alertness  and the desire to move that follows after exposure to red hues, for example,  may be an evolutionary byproduct of seeing blood and knowing something dangerous may be afoot. Cultural color associations on the other hand are learned responses to color. They use the example of brown changing from the color of dirt when you are a child to the color of coffee as an adult. Personal color preferences are determined by everything from fashion trends and time of year but on a deeper level may be based on memories  associated with a particular experience.

The video also brings up ideas about the historical trends of color. Comparing depression era glassware as a tool to lift people out of despair with the wild colors of the 60's shows how our cultural expression of the times is linked directly to color and its associations. They explain how color trend forecasting is based on this mass of data about the years of color trends that have come previously and how the brightly colored 60's swung into the earth tone 70's just as the neon 80's dissolved into a decade of beige in the 90's.

The video  covers a variety of GIF (Graphic Interchange Format)   artists  who have 256 colors in their palette and  some deeper concepts about our colorful lives. It is really worth a watch and is a great way to support the new online presences of PBS!