I snapped up The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations as soon as I stumbled across it, and it has been the most useful and fun colour book I have purchased in years. What is unique about author/designer Leslie Cabarga's approach to colour is his understanding that our perception of how various colours work in combination is cultrally based, and changes over time. A colourful tile that might look fashionable in the late-19th century can look quaint or garish in the 1990s. Cabarga presents hundreds of historical colour combinations based on actual period designs. What makes this useful is that each design comes complete with CMYK codes which can be plugged directly into Photoshop, or converted (roughly) into HTML colour codes. It is no exageration to say that this book has opened me up to a world of colour combinations that I wouldn't have considered in the past.