a color story

color perception
My fascination with color spans a decade, beginning when interaction design was an emerging discipline. From designing one of the first perceptual color interfaces—based on how people actually think about and use color (because they definitely don’t think in RGB)—to creating an interactive exhibit that brought Josef Albers' revolutionary color studies to a computer for the first time, I’ve worked at the intersection of design, technology, and user experience to make color more intuitive and accessible.

“In visual perception, a color is almost never seen as it really is — as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.”

— Josef Albers

digital color
Fresh out of college, I was a software programmer in the early days of computer graphics and animation, developing a color selection interface that required adjusting red, green, and blue values of colored light—not exactly intuitive. At CMU, I was introduced to Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, which inspired my research into the disconnect between how computers represent color and the way humans actually perceive it.

This work was perfectly timed with the rise of color desktop publishing and the first color Mac—providing a platform for me to rethink how people interact with digital color and leading to a connection with Apple’s Human Interface Group.

Josef Albers : A Retrospective
As a result of my work with Apple, I was invited to create Electronic Palette, an interactive exhibit for Josef Albers: A Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Installed as part of the exhibition, my software invited visitors to explore Albers' theories hands-on, just as he originally intended. Instead of simply viewing his work, they could experiment with his color studies on a computer for the first time—experiencing the relativity of color in a more immediate way.

Celebrating one of the masters of color theory and education—and seeing visitors interact with my software at the Guggenheim? Definitely a career highlight.

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