Color, I recently realized, is a big reason why I love my iPad. I spend most of my day looking at black characters on (more or less) white pages. If I have the time to get out to a museum, I’ll sometimes stand in front of paintings, gorging on their colors, until I feel almost woozy. But I don’t often have the time for that. My iPad can give me a chromatic hit to tide me over.
Color Uncovered is a free app produced by the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco. Each page explains how a certain aspect of color works, often using optical tricks, like asking you to stare at a color negative image for 30 seconds, then switching it with a black and white version of the same image, causing it to seem, briefly and gloriously, technicolored.
You may already sorta know this stuff – saturation and complementarity, etc. You learned it in school decades ago. But chances are you don’t really remember it that well, partly because tools like this weren’t around to teach it to you. I confess, though, that I’ve never entirely understood why TV screens are made up of tiny blue, red and green lights when I always thought the primary colors were blue, red and yellow. Now I know.
In addition to the various optical illusions and other illustrations of how our minds and eyes perceive color, this app includes some delightful, deftly edited videos in which people of various ages talk about what certain colors signify to them. Remember those late-night undergraduate bull sessions about how we can’t really be sure that other people are thinking of the same thing we are when they say “red”? Well, these videos could revive such talk. I was mystified by the emotional connotations the interviewees attached to my favorite color (green, if you must know).
Writing often gets short shrift in a visually -based app like Color Uncovered. Not so in this case. The text is perfectly calibrated to be understood by the many young visitors to the Exploratorium, without irritating adult readers. Every aspect of this app, down to its smallest design elements, is beautifully and expertly rendered.
–Laura Miller
