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Summary: Should be on every designer's bookshelf
Review: A terrific source of inspiration. Sure, you can just pick a nice color combination from this book and plug it into your own layouts, but if you take the time to read the entertaining text, you'll come away with a greater ability to discern the interesting color possibilities that we encounter everyday.
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Summary: A must for any designer's library
Review: As a designer, find color combinations that work well together and fit the mood you want is a tough part of my job. This book takes a lot of the guesswork out of that job. Not only do you get great ideas for color, but you also get an excellent overview of colors and design over the past 120 years. It's informative, it's humorous and it's a must have.
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Summary: WOW!
Review: Beautiful book! There is no better color book out there. We are using the book for web design, and I have to say it's amazing. You can really see, feel and taste the color combinations! Buy this book for inspiration.
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Summary: I use this book all the time.
Review: Better than any other book on color combinations, Leslie Cabarga clarifies not only color harmony but color arrangement. I believe his approach to color harmony makes far more sense than color wheels and rainbow illustrations. By taking good examples throughout history, one can get not only a flavor of what works, but can see the color in context. Some combinations repeat themselves, but in different contexts they look different as well. By putting in the CMYK percentages, it is very easy to transfer the colors to a computer for immediate use. For those who are artistically challenged (such as this reviewer), there is a refreshing sense to Cabarga's work. He shows very clearly why bad color combinations are such and why good ones that work do in fact work. Each example is provided in a sensible context rather than a stack of colors, and most valuable is Cabarga's use of variations of the same color set to illustrate how radically different the same group of colors look in different arrangements. I also liked Cabarga's comments about key illustrators and their subject matter--even including expressing doubts about Paul Whiteman being the King of Jazz. Cabarga seems to know his artists and doesn't mind expressing any opinon that comes to mind whether on artists or the state of just about anything. Moreover, his opinions never get in the way of his discussion of color. (Even the opinions are colorful.) It's good to know books are still written by human beings rather than grey committees.
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Summary: Invaluable, but often tiresome
Review: Highly useful for color combinations, but the chatty comments will date the book quickly and embarrassingly. More emphasis on historical color and less on modern would make (a second edition?) even more useful
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Summary: Ho Hum
Review: I bought this book as an idea resource and was quickly sorely dissapointed. This book is full of bland, boring and downright ugly color combinations. Save your money on this one folks.
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Summary: Amazing resource book...
Review: I love this book, it makes my life so much easier coming up with color combinations that work. The best part is that it covers over a century's worth of color schemes, from dark earthy tones of the victorian period to the bright colors of today. There are so many different color combinations to look at, each with a different variation as well. They're all in CMYK too, which makes it easier since I'm not familiar with the Pantone system a lot of books on color use. The only drawback to this book is that it doesn't teach you how to create your own successful color schemes, so you'll need another book on color for that. This book tells you to look at the things around you for inspiration although it never tells you how to convert those colors to CMYK mode. If you have a book or two on the science and practices of good color design, then you'll definately need this for a quick reference to some applied real world design.
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Summary: A lot of fun, and useful too
Review: I snapped up The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations as soon as I stumbled across it, and it has been the most useful and fun colour book I have purchased in years. What is unique about Cabarga's approach to colour is his understanding that our perception of how various colours work in combination is cultrally based, and changes over time. A colourful tile that might look fashionable in the late-19th century can look quaint or garish in the 1990s. Cabarga presents literally hundreds of historical colour combinations based on actual period designs. What makes this useful is that each design comes complete with CMYK codes which can be plugged directly into Photoshop, or converted (roughly) into HTML colour codes. It is no exageration to say that this book has opened me up to a world of colour combinations that I wouldn't have considered in the past. Great stuff.
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Summary: Think Twice Before You By This One!
Review: I was completely disapointed with this book. The description suggested the book would show color combinations to aid in the color selection process for designing print - more like a resource book. What you actually get is a series of busy, outdated illustrations printed in different color combinations - nothing like a resource book. So, if your after illustrations done in differnet color combinations - this is the book for you. If your looking for a resource book - keep looking.
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Summary: Practical Inspiration
Review: Rather than just show color combinations in a vacuum, this book uses real examples from different design periods to demonstrate the use of color. Great as both a reference and inspiration. Also just plain nice to look at.
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