Rating: 
Summary: A Great Time-Waster (I Mean That in the Best Way)
Review: A practical book, a beautiful book and a wonderful resource. Even if you have no need for a graphic design book, this would make a great coffee table book to impress your friends. For the graphic designer, fresh color combinations can (and have for me) changed the direction of an entire project. I work with small business clients in a wide range of businesses and have found this book invaluable for starting new projects, establishing an identity or finding a few neat color combos for a flyer. This book is worth the money!
Rating:
Summary: A Great Time-Waster (I Mean That in the Best Way)
Review: A practical book, a beautiful book and a wonderful resource. Even if you have no need for a graphic design book, this would make a great coffee table book to impress your friends. For the graphic designer, fresh color combinations can (and have for me) changed the direction of an entire project. I work with small business clients in a wide range of businesses and have found this book invaluable for starting new projects, establishing an identity or finding a few neat color combos for a flyer. This book is worth the money!
Rating: 
Summary: A must for any visual artist
Review: Along with its companion book in the series - The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations, The Designer's Guide to "Global" Color Combinations forms an essential reference for any visual artist or print publisher. I recommend these books to my students for their concept, storyboarding, color design, and animation layout work. Each page breaks down a period, era, or style, and analyzes its color makeup with color and contrast swatches, CMYK data for each color, and a series of various combinations that are possible using the specified palette. An artist could spend hours testing and comparing colors. Or they could look through these pages and find a color scheme in minutes.
Rating:
Summary: A must for any visual artist
Review: Along with its companion book in the series - The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations, The Designer's Guide to "Global" Color Combinations forms an essential reference for any visual artist or print publisher. I recommend these books to my students for their concept, storyboarding, color design, and animation layout work. Each page breaks down a period, era, or style, and analyzes its color makeup with color and contrast swatches, CMYK data for each color, and a series of various combinations that are possible using the specified palette. An artist could spend hours testing and comparing colors. Or they could look through these pages and find a color scheme in minutes.
Rating:
Summary: Keeps getting better
Review: As a big fan of Leslie Cabarga's first book on color combinations, I found this one even better. Not only are the combinaitons vibrant and interesting as well as quite practical , the colors are now shown in both RGB and CMYK formulas. Those of us who work in the world of computer colors, especially the Internet where values are expressed as 6-digit hexadecimal numbers divided into RGB, this addition was quite helpful. Cabarga's running commentary is clearly uncensored, and you can tell what the author has on his mind regarding the different examples of color combinaitons. The introduction to the book is a good cultural primer on colors from different places, most of which the author traveled to gather examples of interesting color combinaitons. Like the first book, this one has many lessons not only in color combinations but in color arrangement. By juxtaposing the same color combinaitons in different arrangements, the reader can quickly see what appear to be different combinations but in fact are just different arrangements of the same combinations. Finally, the best thing about this book is that it makes it easy for me to copy a color combination I like. I don't spend hours or even days agonizing over color combinations. I just go through ths book (or Cabarga's first one) and pick a combination I like and then I use it. It saves me time, it looks good, and I've got enough to do. I can't imagine anyone looking for a good book on using color going wrong with this gem.
Rating: 
Summary: A Bit Too Clever for Its Own Good
Review: I was disappointed in this book. It appears to be an ad for Leslie Cabarga's other products, such as his type design. While I find humor can help one learn, I was hoping it would contain more solid information about color and fewer jokes. If I had to do this over again, I would not buy this. There are better books on color theory out there.
Rating:
Summary: Another great Cabarga Book!
Review: If I had to sum this second "Color Combinations" book up in one word...indispensable! Both colour combinations books are very obviously works of a great love (and more than a little obsession) with colours from every aspect of the globe.If you've ever walked the aisles of Asian grocery stores and stared at the packageing...this one's for you. Cabaraga's writing style is very personal and humorous and a refreshing change from the dry "facts" of other color books. (A bit like Deke McClelland's Photoshop Bible really!)
As a designer who shares Cabarga's passion for all things design I highly recommend this book for anyone who has ever sat and tried to piece together a great colour combination for a client.
(my one, tiny, miniscule suggestion for the second edition would be to add combinations from England and Ireland...not just Scotland!)
Rating:
Summary: Another great Cabarga Book!
Review: If I had to sum this second "Color Combinations" book up in one word...indispensable! Both colour combinations books are very obviously works of a great love (and more than a little obsession) with colours from every aspect of the globe.If you've ever walked the aisles of Asian grocery stores and stared at the packageing...this one's for you. Cabaraga's writing style is very personal and humorous and a refreshing change from the dry "facts" of other color books. (A bit like Deke McClelland's Photoshop Bible really!)
As a designer who shares Cabarga's passion for all things design I highly recommend this book for anyone who has ever sat and tried to piece together a great colour combination for a client.
(my one, tiny, miniscule suggestion for the second edition would be to add combinations from England and Ireland...not just Scotland!)
Rating:
Summary: Lively! Fun! Fantastic!
Review: If you are an artist or designer in need of color schemes and inspiration - this book is for you. Hundreds of schemes are layed out so you can easily envision how your final piece will look. These are unique, unusual, complex color combinations that you won't find in the "Designer's Guide to Color" series. And it is full of examples of many of the palettes in use.
So that's the meat of the book: useful, practical, and inspirational.
But my favorite aspect of this book is the humour. All of Cabarga's books are a blast. I have so much fun reading them that I lose track of time, and the reason I opened them in the first place. Now I've learned to either read them for the fun of it - or give myself a lot of extra time when looking for coor ideas.
Rating:
Summary: Lively! Fun! Fantastic!
Review: In this companion volume to THE DESIGNER'S GUIDE TO COLOR COMBINATIONS, author/editor Leslie Cabarga has outdone himself; yet, the book is so spectacularly beautiful, witty and fun, that the reader may not initially comprehend just what an colossally ambitious work it is. Cabarga spent 19 months traveling the globe collecting color swatches from an enormous "database" of human tribes, countries and civilizations; rarely fine art, mind you, but the work of craftsmen and women plying their native trades... Cabarga winnowed down his collection to a few which might most closely represent the "inner colors" of a particular nation or people...
It's worth buying this book alone just to study the deep, soulful, mysterious green the Pakistanis cherish. Those already familiar with Cabarga's democratic and catholic (and witty) color eye know that he sees as much charm in a cheap, tacky Chinese toy label as he does beauty in a shimmering, transcendant Tibetan religious painting. Mr. Cabarga has reached that deliciously opportune time in his life and career in which he both thoroughly knows the history of the Old-Old-Old School... yet he is as bleeding-edge Hip-- or Hipper-- than anyone reading the book. (One is tempted to draw a comparison to a Leonard Bernstein and his Young People's Concerts.) Mr. Cabarga is every bit the graphic art genius that R.Crumb is-- but with a more humane and loving pen-- and this book solidifies him as one of our national treasures. Artists of every stripe will benefit from the text and color swatches within this book.
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