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X-Rite, the color tech company that now operates Pantone, shared a grim statistic: 1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some kind of color vision deficiency. If you're curious where your own color vision falls in that statistic, give its new online color tester a try. After arranging four strips of tiles in hue order, you'll receive an exact numerical score, the lower the better, and a percentile comparing your results to the rest of the field. The online test is an adaptation of X-Rite's FM 100 Hue test, a physical version of the test with actual hue tiles, often used as part of a recruiting process. 

The masterwork of renowned arts educator Josef Albers, Interaction of Color has occupied a hallowed place on many bookshelves since its publication in 1963, becoming a go-to reference on pigments and perception. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the design firm Potion, in collaboration with The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation and Yale University Press, created an interactive iPad app updating this bible of color theory for the 21st century, allowing users to delve into his ideas and, as the teacher would certainly approve, play and experiment.

The former Bauhaus professor, who worked alongside Klee and Kandinsky before emigrating to the United States in 1933, spent decades teaching at institutions including Yale and Black Mountain College, experimenting and refining his ideas about how colors influence one another. This new version of Interaction includes more than 125 of his original color studies on the topics of intensity, transparency and temperature, as well as more than 60 interactive plates and a palette tool, allowing readers to directly apply his ideas. Archival videos of Albers, as well as commentary by contemporary practitioners like textile designer Christopher Farr, graphic designer Peter Mendelsund and painters Anoka Faruqee and Brice Marden, round out the educational experience. If only all textbooks were this exciting.

 

The App Stores released a free version of Interaction of Color today containing a full chapter and color palette. The full version, with more than 125 color plates and 60 interactive studies, is available as an in-App purchase for $9.99.