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The motif is based on a series of paintings by the abstract artist Josef Albers entitled

Homage to the Square

Albers (1888-1976) was an important figure in the Bauhaus, and later in America. He was well known both as an artist and teacher. Through his paintings he aimed to "influence the mental process so that order and meaning, pleasure and reason would increase, and angst disappear".*

He began his series of pictures Homage to the Square in 1949. By reducing the form to a minimum he could experiment with the visual effects of using different colours in different combinations, and he produced over 1,000 variants on this same theme. See some examples of Josef Albers' work.

In the same spirit of experimentation, we have adapted his design with our own choice of Web-friendly colours arranged in different sequences to help users of our Web pages know where they are. We hope it will help you to gain order and meaning and pleasure from our pages.

Albers' advice to his students was always to "respect the material", and we have found his design is ideally suited to the Web. Its geometry and economy of form make it scalable, adaptable and very compact. It should download quickly onto your computer screen and its clean lines should make a change from the fuzziness or blockiness you often see.

Use of the basic design, which we have adapted with our own Web-friendly colours, is courtesy of the Dover Press.

* Bauhaus (Fiedler and Feierabend, 2000).