Our response to color is almost primal.  Color can make us desire something or recoil from it.  Color as symbol is an admixture of culturally rooted meaning and deeply personal experience, and it is always evolving.  Yet color is perceived differently and with varying subtly by each of us.  In fact, it is all in our heads – it’s our brains that give objects color.  For all these reasons and more, using words to talk about color, or to search for it on the web, or to communicate it to another person can be very, very difficult.  Which is ironic fitting, as color itself can communication much more than words can say.

Color by Number

Munsell Color Tree

Find images by color or palette

TinEye Labs – Multicolr Search Engine
Allows users to click colors on a palette and uses the hexadecimal system to retrieve Creative Commons images from Flickr.  Provides users with the hexadecimal number of the colors they have chosen.
Copper Hewitt Museum – Our collection by color
Like the TinEye search, users can click on colors from a square palette and the search uses the hexadecimal system to retrieve matches (or near matches) from the museums extensive collection of textiles, posters, and other design & decorative arts items.
Hermitage Museum – Search by Color and Color Layout
The former palace of the Russian Czars, The Hermitage is one of the world’s grandest and greatest art museums.  Teaming with IBM you can now search their collection by color and multi-color layout. кру́то!

Color ‘n Books (including coloring books)

If you want to find books about a specific color or about color in general, chances are that you would like a expert overview about the history, symbolism, or use of color in a certain fields,  Here are some hints for searching our catalog (or any library catalog) with some precision.

• Add one or two defining terms to your keyword search.  Some good ones for our collection at FIT include:  art, design, fashion, theory, psychology, symbolism, consumer behavior, marketing 
• If you are still getting a lot of false hits, try searching for your words in the Subject Headings of the catalog, instead of searching everything.  This will go a long way to eliminate off-topic books, like Green is the New Black or Famous for Fifteen Minutes by Ultra Violet, which have little or nothing to do with color.
• Think of alternate terms that relate to color.  Books about Pigment or Dyes might not have the word color in the title or subject, but might still be very relevant.  Books about Trend Forecasting definitely will have great information about color trend cycles.
• And, yes, we do have coloring books . . . and we also have scanners and photocopy machines.  Just sayin’