Designer's Guide to Color 5

Rating:
Summary: Where'd my special K go?
Review: One of the things I hate and find irritating about this book is its complete lack of utilizing the color black. In fact, of all the hundreds of color combinations contained in this little book, the color black (K) is completely missing. And that, contrary to what some people might think, is an extremely important color in CMYK printing. It also lists all color combos in YMC order, which I've never seen before in any color book. It gets very confusing when trying to input the values into any program, as they are all set up to take CMYK in that order. But you don't have to worry about getting the K value--the authors just left it out. Quite unforgivable. I also found the color combos shown here to be extremely UN-complementary. I've had more than one client tell me, after showing them a couple of designs using these color combos, that the schema looked "awful" or just plain "ugly." I did too, but since my confidence in color coordination is not that high, I needed second opinions. Which I got. So I put it on the back shelf and let it gain 10%K dust in the 100%K recesses where I hope to never find or use it again. There are just too many books out there that are simply better.

Rating:
Summary: Colors matched
Review: This is a very useful designers reference book. I wish that they've listed the colors in the order of C-M-Y-K instead of Y-M-C-K, it gets confusing when I want to plug in the numbers to my color palette. Timeless color combinations. Very useful even in the year 2000, even though it has been almost ten years since it got published. Pantone combinations would be helpful for next publications (if they haven't done it yet) Thanks for your guidance when I get stuck with no creative color ideas.

Rating:
Summary: A good guide of color combinations
Review: Very good, if not thorough, color reference, with very good color combinations (color charts are included as well). Perhaps a bigger variety of "moods" or "styles" (as the combinations are classified) could have made this book more of a definitive reference.

The prose that accompanies each chapter and tries to bring some rationality to the choices of colors and explain the creation of new combinations is somewhat shallow, and I found it quite confusing for the use of terms left unexplained, and a somewhat clunky translation from the Japanese.