NEW HAVEN, CONN.- Fifty years after first publishing Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color—a classic that is now widely revered as one of the most influential art books ever written—Yale University Press announced the launch of the Interaction of Color app available exclusively for iPad. This app faithfully honors and enhances the original masterpiece and carries Albers’s famed teaching methodology into the twenty-first century. Created in partnership with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and developed by Potion, an award-winning design and technology firm specializing in interactive experiences, the Interaction of Color app has been devised to engage and benefit professionals and students alike, artists and design practitioners across disciplines, arts educators, and anyone who wishes to learn more about how to think creatively about color and its uses. With innovative technology—including a remarkable and beautiful new color palette tool—the app allows users to engage in the hands-on experimentation with color that Albers placed at the center of his work with students.

Video interviews with noteworthy practitioners such as textile designer Christopher Farr, graphic designer Peter Mendelsund, painters Anoka Faruqee and Brice Marden, product designer Brian Mullan (director of sourcing and product development at Fab), quilt and fabric designer Denyse Schmidt, architect Anabelle Seldorf, and cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber (exec¬u-tive direc¬tor of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation) further enrich the user’s experience. Elegant and accessible, the Interaction of Color app has the power to transform the way one sees and thinks about color.

Features of the app include:

• Full text and plate commentary.

• Over 125 of the original color studies, including the “flaps” and moving pieces that have made the studies so captivating to generations of students.

• Over 60 interactive plates and studies that allow you to experiment with color and find your own solutions to Albers’s famous problems.

• Detailed discussion of key principles, including the relativity of color; light intensity and brightness; how to make one color look like two or two colors look like one; transparency; after-image; film and volume colors; color temperature and humidity; and vibrating and disappearing boundaries.

• The ability to create, save, and export your final designs and palettes into your favorite design software.

• A beautiful new color palette tool.

• Archival video of Albers in the classroom, and audio of the renowned teacher talking you through special exercises.

• Original video commentary by experts explaining Albers’s principles, making even the most challenging problems easy to understand.

• Interviews with leading designers and artists explaining how they use color in their professional practices.

The Interaction of Color app is available FREE from the App Store on iPad at www.AppStore.com/InteractionofColor, and the complete version is available as an in-app purchase for $9.99. The free version allows users to view a full chapter, including text, commentary, and two interactive plates, and to experiment with all the features, including the color palette tool. The full version includes the complete text, over 125 color plates, over 60 interactive studies, and a wide range of video commentaries, interviews, and additional features.

A dedicated website includes further information, a sampler of video commentary and a demo video, and answers to frequently asked questions.

JOSEF ALBERS AND INTERACTION OF COLOR:
Josef Albers (March 19, 1888 – March 25, 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the twentieth century. His classic book Interaction of Color is a masterwork: conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, it presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience. Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and remains one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.

Holland Cotter, writing appreciatively of Albers in the New York Times in 2012, noted that many art histories portray Albers as a “theory-bound Puritan,” but “in reality he was a besotted lover, obsessed, as lovers are, by a single object of desire, which in his case was color.”