Vintage Colour Wheels, Charts and Tables Throughout History



As a graphic designer, where colour inspiration is pretty darn important, so this selection of Vintage Colour Wheels, Charts and Tables Throughout History has made me far too excitable!

The moment I found the post, and saw the featured image and post title, I clicked it straight away, and onto the website of Public Domain Review: A Project of the Open Knowledge Foundation, which is a website I’d highly recommend poking around.

Vintage Colour Wheels, Charts and Tables Through History

You know sometimes you can visit a post and ultimately end up somewhat, or very, disappointed with the content, like the featured image and fancy headline is literally the best bit, but not so in this case.

So here’s the thing for any of your commercial printing nerds (me included): many of the images featured have been sourced from Sarah Lowengard’s book: The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe – published electronically on Gutenberg-e in 2006.

Also, according to PDR, another must-have book on colour, is: Philip Ball’s Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (2003) for a great look at how art, chemistry, and technology have interacted through the ages.

Anywho, enjoy some of the featured images below, and remember to visit: http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/colour-wheels-charts-and-tables-through-history/

I’ve picked out a handful of the various colour charts, colour wheels and other forms of colour illustrations for you – not all of them as that’d spoil the surprise when you visit the original post on : Colour Wheels, Charts, and Tables Through History

My favorite has to be this one below. It’s just so gorgeous, and just so very olf, not to mention trying to visualise Richard Waller painstakingly creating this colour chart, or to be precise: Tabula Colorum Physiologica (1686)

Richard Waller’s “Tabula Colorum Physiologica”, from “A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt Its Properties,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 6 for the years 1686 and 1687 (1688)

Circular chart showing “complementary contrasts” from A Class-Book of Color: including color definitions, color scaling, and the harmony of colors (1895) by Mark Maycock

Philipp Otto Runge’s Farbenkugel (1810). The top two images show the surface of the sphere, while the bottom two show horizontal and vertical cross sections

Three plates from Robert Ridgeway’s Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (1912)

Vintage Colour Wheels, Charts and Tables Through History

Parsons’ Spectrum Color Chart, an Illustration from The Principles of Advertising Arrangement (1912) by Frank Alvah Parsons.

Vintage Colour Wheels, Charts and Tables Through History

Page from Priced catalogue of artists’ materials : supplies for oil painting, water color painting, china painting … and drawing materials for architects and engineers, manual training schools and colleges (1914)