WORK
ABOUT
CONTACT
FROM PIGMENT TO PIXEL Parsons Capstone Project 2025
This project asks how color accumulates meaning through labor, geography, scarcity, and control, and what happens to those histories as color moves into standardized digital systems. The project approaches blue not as decoration but as cultural infrastructure, tracing it from the trade routes that made ultramarine a symbol of power to the Pantone numbering system that turned it into a shared global language. The final artifact is a hand-bound book, a format chosen deliberately: because the project is about materiality, it was important that the work itself could be held and physically experienced. The book becomes an object that mirrors the histories it documents.
Page Count: 102 Dimensions: 5” x 7”
STRUCTURE & DESIGN
The book alternates between contextual chapters, which establish how color functions historically, technically, and culturally, and color stories that slow the pace and focus on a single specific blue at a time.
Typography reinforces that rhythm. Greycliff CF supports sustained reading through dense research, while Hagrid marks new entry points through headers and opening lines, creating a pause before each section deepens.
The palette stays almost entirely within the blue spectrum throughout, with the only exceptions being historical artifacts reproduced as their makers intended.
Typography reinforces that rhythm. Greycliff CF supports sustained reading through dense research, while Hagrid marks new entry points through headers and opening lines, creating a pause before each section deepens.
The palette stays almost entirely within the blue spectrum throughout, with the only exceptions being historical artifacts reproduced as their makers intended.
The book opens by establishing color as both material and cultural. Pigments are substances shaped by chemistry, geography, and labor, and the way we perceive them is always informed by context.
Early color stories trace moments when blue functioned as material power: Indigo, Egyptian Blue, Prussian Blue, and Ultramarine each reveal different conditions where scarcity, trade, and technological innovation gave color its value.
What the project ultimately shows is that as color moves from pigment to system, its histories don't disappear. They reorganize. For designers, that means color choices are never neutral. They carry inherited structures of value, even when they appear only technical.
Early color stories trace moments when blue functioned as material power: Indigo, Egyptian Blue, Prussian Blue, and Ultramarine each reveal different conditions where scarcity, trade, and technological innovation gave color its value.
What the project ultimately shows is that as color moves from pigment to system, its histories don't disappear. They reorganize. For designers, that means color choices are never neutral. They carry inherited structures of value, even when they appear only technical.