This book is ambitiously inter-disciplinary. Its full-color works form a striking contribution to the commonwealth of color studies and to a possible unification of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures (Science and Art). Color and inter-disciplinarity go hand in hand. This so often involves the authors leaving the comfort zone of their original specialty and striving for excellence in another. It seems that our perceptions of aesthetics and beauty must be very flexible indeed so as to find absolute opposites equally fascinating.

The book involves four main types of contributions, defined in terms of the authors themselves. First, there are contributions by biologists. Second, the largest section is by practicing artists. Third, there are two engineering-based contributions. Finally, there are contributions that address some of the historical proponents of color theory and art.