CSC151 2007S, Class 07: A Design Perspective

Admin:
* Assignment 3 was returned over the weekend, accompanied by some notes.  Let me know if you didn't receive evaluation, grade, or notes.
* Assignment 1 was also returned over the weekend.  You can find my responses to your questions online.
* Today we're trying something a bit different - Letting an art professor teach a CS class.
* I've split Friday's reading and lab into two readings and two labs.  You may want to review them.
* Professor Kluber tells us some basic 

Overview:
* Approaching colors.
* Managing the huge palette.
* Other design issues.

/Introductory Stuff/

* Watch Sam attempt to get the key ideas down.  Note that he'll fail.
* Kluber is here to talk to us about color.
  * Escaping from his lab, where he is spending the year with aluminum
  * Trained in a studio situation
    * Similar to here?
    * Get some basic ideas
    * Get to work with those ideas
  * Also teaches the Digital Art course
* Thinking about formal qualities of color
* Creating and manipulating images is a powerful thing
* The more theory you know, the more "articulate" your work will be
* Matisse Quote
  * "The chief aim of color shoudl be to serve expression as well as possible."
  * Don't take color for granted

/Light and Color/

* Incandescence vs. Luminescence
  * Luminescent is cooler
* Both produce "white light"
* Newton showed that white light can be separated into separate colors and then combined back again into white
* Subtractive vs. additive color
  * In subtractive color (paintings, etc.), the pigment absorbs light,
    leaving only the color seen.
  * In additive color, each component produces light
  * In theory, adding together every subtractive pigment should produce black
  * In theory, adding together every additive color should produce white
  * In practice, adding together subtractives gives ugly brown
    * Painters need to buy black paint.
  * In practice, adding together additives does give white 

/The Basic Colors/

* Hues: The basic name of a color.  We vary these significantly.
* [Sam can't draw the diagram, which is a six-pointed star.]
* Primary: Red, Yellow, and Blue
* Secondary: Mixture of two primaries
* Tertiary: Primary and an adjacent secondary
* Value: Lightness and Darkness

/Color Schemes/

* [Sam is too lazy to type; See handout]

/Color on Different Devices/

* For those who work with the computer as their artistic device, there
  are many challenges
* Not all monitors give the same colors for the same RGB components
* While we design on monitors (additive), we print on paper (subtractive)
  * How do you convert well between the two?

/Other concepts/

* Positive shape and negative space
* Shifting scale can make things less two dimensional
* What you see in the media has been carefully thought out and manipulated

/Writing Algorithms/

* Challenge: What algorithms did this presentation suggest?
* Computing compleemnts and such
* Transparency: Mixing colors so that one seems to be on top of another
* Computing images that show colors in context
* ...