"If one says ‘Red’ – the name of color – and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds." - Josef Albers

Color is a peculiar thing. Every day and all around us we perceive color. It wouldn’t be odd to expect color to be simple to explain and that relating it to the world around us would be easy. Instead, color perception is a complicated process.

And to complicate matters more, because the color representation used in most software is based on how CRT displays in the 1990s worked, programming color in software that behaves similarly to how it would act in the physical world is harder than it needs to be.

This workshop will cover the basics of how color perception works, how it is modeled in software, and how almost all software, doing any sort of color manipulation, gets color wrong. It will then introduce you to approaches of programming color that are closer to how we instinctively perceive color in our day-to-day lives.

The session will be in 2 parts: A presentation followed by programming demos in p5.js (And Arduino using Neopixels if there is interest/time).