Albers

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  Home Dashboard

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Inspiration

Josef Albers, a highly influential art educator in the 20th century, is known for his groundbreaking work in color theory. Alber's teaching method consisted of encouraging students to experiment with colors, in order to learn through experience how color can be unpredictable and misleading. However, as someone who has taught online art classes to high school students during COVID, I have noticed that it is difficult to demonstrate color theory without the necessary art supplies. Without these supplies, it is almost impossible to convey the relationship between colors in the same way that Albers did traditionally.

Problem

High material costs hinder high school and college students from learning visual arts. Mastery of color theory is essential in all areas of visual art, but traditionally, it can only be learned by those who have access to paint.

Solution

Albers is a gamified approach to color theory designed for high school and college art students. It consists of three timed games, each covering a different aspect of color. The purpose is for art teachers to incorporate Albers into their color theory lessons. By mastering color identification and relationships through Albers, students can reduce their reliance on art supplies when experimenting in the future.

How we built it

Albers is a React web application. It features a home dashboard that prompts users to select one of three tracks. Based on their selection, customized and randomized questions are generated for them. This helps users test and enhance their knowledge of color theory.

Challenges we ran into

RGB is an additive color model, unlike paint which is subtractive. This means that increasing the color in any channel will create brighter colors, which eventually results in white. On the other hand, adding more color in paint ultimately results in black. Translating RGB color mixing into the RYB (Red Yellow Blue) color model, which physical artists use, was a challenging task for us.

What we learned

Access to art education remains limited due to the expensive nature of art supplies. Converting between color models is a lot more challenging than we expected.

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• python
• react
• typescript