Tracing Blue: From pigment to pixel

Tracing Blue: From Pigment to Pixel is a hand-bound artist's book that investigates how color moves from physical pigment into standardized digital systems, and how those histories continue to shape the way designers use and interpret color today. The project approaches blue not as decoration but as cultural infrastructure, tracing how it has accumulated meaning through labor, geography, scarcity, and control across centuries.

The book is structured as a rhythm between contextual chapters and color stories. Contextual chapters establish how color functions historically, technically, and culturally. Color stories slow the pace and focus on a single blue at a time: Indigo, Egyptian Blue, Prussian Blue, Ultramarine, Web-Safe Blue, Cyan, and Pantone's Classic Blue. This structure mirrors how color itself operates, as both part of a system and a singular encounter, allowing the reader to understand color not just intellectually but materially and culturally.

The format was chosen intentionally. Because the project is about materiality, about pigments as substances shaped by labor, geography, and touch, it was important that the work itself could be held and physically experienced. The book becomes a material object that mirrors the histories it documents.

What the project ultimately shows is that as color moves from pigment to system, its histories don't disappear; they reorganize. Pantone makes this most explicit, turning color into a numbered global language that abstracts blue from its material origin while preserving its cultural authority. For designers, that means color choices are never neutral. They carry inherited structures of value, even when they appear to be only technical.