👨🏻 Nader Sadoughi
Vibrating Boundaries are ordinary colors that hack the visual system into glowing.The above colors only glow together, the glowing squares are actally the same color as this page’s background. Josef Albers’ InventionIn his book Interaction of Color (Albers, 1964) provides instructions of how to make a vibrating boundary:“The conditions for these varying effects occur between colors which are contrasting in their hues but also close or similar in light intensity”.
A 2 Ingredient RecipeAlbers’ instructions can be broken down into a recipe requiring 2 ingredients to reproduce:
  • opposite hue 🟥 🟩 (h2 = h1 + 180°)
  • equal lightness ⬜️ = ⬜️ (L1 = L2)
DIY: Pick Your Tool WiselyHSB & HSL pickers do not uniformly demonstrate lightness, as explained in this presentation. CAM16, or CIELab in your Photoshop color picker allows for this to be done more accurately. CIELab is discouraged, due to being less perceptually relevant than other newer systems.For CAM16, use parameters:
  • La = 80 cd/m2
  • Yb = 20
  • surround = average
  • XYZw = D65
  • RGB colorspace: sRGB
If you aren’t able to work with CAM16, you can use the similarly well performing CIECAM02 in this color picker found here. For CIELab in Adobe Photoshop, use this color converter to convert to CIELCh from CIELab, or instead use this LCh color picker.





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