Our next webinar on Sunday September 6 will discuss Advances in Colour Literacy, a new book series by the Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC)/ International Colour Association (AIC) Colour Literacy Project. The series is Open Access and will be freely available through the Colour Literacy Project website. Volume One, which will be launched on September 3 at the AIC 2026 Mid-term Meeting in Florence, contains thirteen invited, peer-reviewed chapters ranging “from the deepest foundations of colour perception to its most contemporary educational and cultural stakes”.
We are honoured to have Editor-in-Chief Dr Ingrid Calvo Ivanovic to speak about the series as a whole and the contents of Volume One, after which our two Australian contributors to the volume, Dr David J. C. Briggs and Dr Paul Green-Armytage, will give overviews of their chapters. A more extended online event by the whole Colour Literacy Project team will be given by the AIC/ISCC in late September.
Attendance is free but limited to 100 places world-wide and registration by midnight AEST on September 5 is essential. Successful registrants will be notified by return email and will receive the Zoom link by email shortly before the event. Bookings are open now for Colour Society of Australia members and will open for non-members on August 24. Please do not register if you don't plan to attend live; a recording of the webinar will be available on the CSA YouTube channel from shortly after the event.
Please help us to spread word of this event by sharing our posts on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, by sharing the event link at https://coloursociety.org.au/event-6804798 with your friends, colleagues and students, or by printing out our pdf poster. And stay tuned for our next webinar on Sunday September 30, Color chart of southern Chile: applications in design and architecture, with Professor Elisa Cordero-Jahr of the School of Design of the Faculty of Architecture and Arts, Universidad Austral de Chile!
ADVANCES IN COLOUR LITERACY, VOLUME ONE
"Since its inception, the (
Colour Literacy) Project has operated on the premise that colour knowledge is not a specialist concern for those who happen to care about it, but a foundational dimension of visual education that has been persistently neglected — in curricula, in professional training, and in the public discourse through which colour is most often reduced to preference, trend, or decoration. The
Colour Literacy Forums
are one of the Project’s primary mechanisms for changing that: a series of public conversations bringing together researchers, educators, and practitioners from across the disciplines that engage with colour, to speak directly and substantively about what we know, what we misunderstand, and what remains unresolved".
"Advances in Colour Literacy, Volume 1, is the first attempt to preserve and extend that conversation in a book. It gathers eleven original contributions from speakers of the first thirteen Forums, representing disciplines as distinct as evolutionary biology, philosophy of perception, colour science, architecture, cultural studies, and design education. The chapters were written for this volume, not simply transcribed from their presentations; each author has developed, expanded, and in some cases substantially reframed the ideas they brought to the Forum. What remains from those original conversations is the animating spirit: the willingness to take colour seriously on its own terms, rather than as a subsidiary of another discipline’s concerns" (from the Preface by Ingrid Calvo Ivanovic).
PART I: ORIGINS & ONTOLOGY
Chapter 1
: The Introduction of Vision by Andrew Richard Parker
Chapter 2: Colours at the Intersection of Perception and Metaphysics by Valtteri Arstila
PART II: THE STRUCTURE OF PERCEPTION
Chapter 3:
Colours of Objects and Colours of Light by
David J. C. Briggs
Chapter 4:
Levels of Perceiving and Experiencing Colours by
Harald Arnkil
Chapter 5:
Cesia: Visual Appearance beyond Colour —Concept, Framework, and Applications in Architecture by
Jose Luis Caivano
PART III: COLOUR IN PRACTICE
Chapter 6:
Colours and Mixing by
Paul Green-Armytage
Chapter 7:
Beyond Hue: How Lightness and Chroma shape Colour Meaning and its Application in the Design Process by
Ellen Divers
PART IV: COLOUR IN EDUCATION & CULTURE
Chapter 8:
Colour Misconceptions and Their Impact in the Classroom by
Robert Hirschler &
Andreas Schwarz
Chapter 9:
Colour in Art Education: Does the History of Colour Matter for Practice? by
Judith Mottram
Chapter 10:
Pink as Method: Theorizing the ‘Political Anatomy’ of Gender by
Dominique Grisard
Chapter 11: Colour Literacy as Design Infrastructure: Reclassifying Colour for Contemporary Design Practice by Ingrid Calvo Ivanovic
In his chapter, Colours of Objects and Colours of Light, "David J. C. Briggs provides the perceptual science that the volume’s central argument requires. His chapter establishes, with rigour and accessibility, the distinction between object colours and illumination colours — between what we perceive as belonging to surfaces and what we perceive as belonging to the light that falls on them. Against the widespread assumption that we perceive a single colour at each point in the visual field (what he calls the ‘one-layer’ or ‘colour photo’ model), Briggs demonstrates that human colour perception is layered: we simultaneously perceive object colours with their attributes of hue, lightness, and chroma, and illumination colours characterised by brightness and colourfulness, superimposed in the same scene. Grounded throughout in the definitions of the CIE International Lighting Vocabulary, the chapter uses a sustained illustration — an orange cube on a tiled floor — to make visible a structure of perception that is so automatic and so rapid that we rarely notice it is happening at all. David presented at Forum #8, held on June 2024, on the topic of The Interaction of Colour and Light' (from the Preface by Ingrid Calvo Ivanovic)
In his chapter Colours and Mixing, "Paul Green-Armytage addresses one of the most persistent and consequential confusions in colour education: what happens when we mix colours. The chapter opens with a demonstration that is also an argument — a spinning disc painted in segments of blue and yellow that, when spun, produces not green but a muted greyish pink, confounding the expectation that blue and yellow always make green. The source of the confusion, Green-Armytage shows, is a failure to distinguish between the colour stimulus (lights, paints, inks) and the colour sensation (conscious experience of colour) — and between the three very different processes by which stimuli can be combined: additive mixing of lights, subtractive mixing of paints and inks, and partitive mixing, in which separate stimuli blend spatially. The chapter introduces the concept of the elastic colour circle — a hue circle whose intervals can be stretched or compressed to reconcile the different complementary relationships that different mixing processes produce — and closes with a classroom exercise that makes the whole argument tangible in the hands of students. Paul presented at Forum #13, held on October 2025, on the topic of Colour MIXconceptions: Comparative Mixing Processes" (from the Preface by Ingrid Calvo Ivanovic).
OUR SPEAKERS
Dr Ingrid Calvo Ivanovic is a Colour Designer, Researcher and Consultant and holds a PhD in Design Research from Politecnico di Milano and an MA in Visual Studies. She is a Member of the Executive Committee of the International Colour Association (AIC), the Editorial Board of the Wiley Color Research & Application Journal, the AIC Study Group on Colour Education (SGCE), the AIC Study Group on Environmental Colour Design (ECD) and the Design Committee of the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID), Chile. Ingrid is Assistant Professor of the Design Department of Universidad de Chile, and Invited Lecturer at Politecnico di Milano. For more than 15 years, Ingrid has been a full-time colour researcher and epistemologist, developing methodologies for its study, teaching, and application in design, architecture, art, and curatorial studies. Ingrid has presented specialized conferences and workshops in different countries in America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.
Dr David Briggs is a classically-trained painter, art educator and researcher who has taught colour and painting classes since 1996 and has created online resources on colour for painters since the launch of his website The Dimensions of Colour in 2007. His many publications and presentations include a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour (2020). David is Past President, Vice President, and NSW Division Chair of the Colour Society of Australia, Co-Chair of the International Colour Association (AIC) Study Group on Arts and Design and a committee member of the AIC/ISCC Colour Literacy Project and CIE Technical Committee 1-99. David has been teaching public online and on-campus short courses at the National Art School, Sydney, since 2011, before which he wrote and presented a NAS undergraduate elective on the history of colour theory and practice.
Dr Paul Green-Armytage was born and educated in England, graduating as an architect. He had some ten years’ experience as a practising designer in England, Canada and Australia, working as an architect, exhibition designer and set designer for television, before taking up a position as senior lecturer in charge of the first year program in design at what is now Curtin University in Western Australia. Early in his academic career he developed a research interest in colour. Green-Armytage was awarded his PhD in 2005; his thesis was titled “Colour, Language and Design”. He has contributed papers at many national and international conferences, several by invitation, served as a member of the executive committee of the International Colour Association, and as president of the Colour Society of Australia. He is retired from teaching but remains active as a researcher, writer and educator, and has been a member of the Colour Literacy Project team from its launch in 2020.
