Book Review

The Complete Colour Reference Manual by John Miner is an interactive version of his book that first published 1990. This HTML version of his book gives in depth details of the psychology colour, colour symbolism and its communication.

Basically, this publication is divided into four chapters and an extensive section for quick references. The first chapter is mainly about colour and its influences on our decision making. It describes how human behaves subconsciously towards many different types of colour and how the industries cope with the issue. The second chapter, however, focuses on the individual personalities in relation to colour. Besides, the author also explains the effects of colour on plant and insects kingdom. Later in the third chapter, he digs into business secrets that uses psychology colour. He covers right from the usage of colour in the corporate identity to the colour of the wall in a factory. What colour sells the best and how colour reduces malingers, to name a few topic. Lastly, the author takes us around into home and business offices to show how colour of premises affect our mind and health.

John Miner's Colour Reference Manual gives me a deep insight of colour symbolism and psychology. It also provides a good guideline to improve our mental health through the knowledge in colour psychology. I started to wear more colours after reading that book! I highly recommend this book to those who is involved in business and interior design industry because it gives a wide spectrum of useful advice on picking the right colour for home, offices and other premise spaces. The colour theory in the book tells which colour affects the productivity of the employees and how colours help to create a warm feeling environment at home. Furthermore, it also helps those designers who want to know which colour that have the most impact and which colour would sell the best.

However, the layout design of the electronic publication makes an uneasy feeling when reading too long on the computer screen. The busy background pattern along with the heavy bold typeface in tight leading gives a poor-reading page. It gives a feeling of visual overkill where the page crammed with a lot of heavy text, busy background image and colourful horizontal bar. Besides, the Internet version of this book have not fully use the capability of an interactive multimedia product. What are missing are those hyperlinks, intuitive interface design and animated infographics.