For this book, each student in Yale’s graduating Graphic Design MFA class was given 16 pages of particular shade of colored paper. Their responses vary from the sublime (Sarah Gifford’s careful study of the relative nature of the color “orchid”), to the playful (Jeffrey Lai’s gestural hand-drawn trophies), to the informative (John Caserta’s sobering chronology of color technology), to the mercurial (Meng-Chieh Jammie Lin’s whimsical photographs of projected text). Christian Schmidt’s investigation of the color red challenges assumptions about how we “read” revolution, while Jena Sher’s didactic black and white text comments on censorship and the complexity inherent in veiled information.

As a series, these 16 independent investigations offer a cumulative snapshot of the ways that color so seamlessly weaves itself throughout our daily lives, not only through form and content, but also through the tensions revealed between message and expectation; context and deviation; image and language; illusion and reality.

Students collaborated with Dutch designers Irma Boom and Linda Van Deursen and produced this book as a companion to an exhibition of the same name.