| Author | Messages | |
 | | 11/23/2007 5:17 AM |  Alert
| Color theoryColor is a very important part of a design. It's used in all kinds of design: logos, flyers, magazines, web sites, photos, etc. So, no matter what you design, you should have some knowledge about colors as a designer.
Colors communicate, they give the viewer a feeling, and you have to know what feeling, so you can use it to your advantage. Most people get the same kind of feeling with a color, this is because nature communicates with colors too.
Fire is red, so red gives people the feeling of "danger", this is not necessarily a negative reaction because it will also make sure people pay attention to it. Some reactions that all people have, but are not from nature are from rules we made ourselves.
Green means "safe" for example, because a traffic light is green when the road is safe to drive. Red also means "love" because with valentines day you see red hearts in the shops everywhere. I will tell you the rules we made with every color.
RED strength, passion, danger, alertness, aggression, energy, fire, blood, hate, love, pain, romanticism, sexuality, warmth, hot, evil, stop (in other words, red will get the attention of people for sure!)
ORANGE creativity, excitement, happiness, security, service, success, warning, wisdom, extravagant, fun (orange is a very positive color)
YELLOW activity, brightness, imagination, knowledge, logic, light, optimism, sunshine, gold, intelligent, spontaneous
GREEN calmness, environment, luck, nature, renewal, safety, dependable, ill, unskilled
BLUE coolness, depression, freedom, peace, responsibility, sad, technology, water (think of the blue sky and sea)
PURPLE art, beauty, fantasy, fashion, justice, leadership, magic, pride, royalty, richness, seriousness, spirituality, value, truth, luxurious, arrogant, desperate
BLACK mystery, darkness, evil, scary, death, criminal
WHITE clean, marriage, blank, innocent, empty, peace
If you want to use more than one color you have to make sure the two or more colors look good together. This can be done with contrast (or the lack of contrast of course). The artist Johannes Itten discovered 7 different kinds of contrast. He was one of the first people who defined strategies for successful color combinations.
Contrast of complementsEach color has a complementary color, if you mix these 2 colors with paint you will get a grey color. This is because the colors have an opposite “hue”. Isaac Newton discovered this fact. In this image of the color wheel you can see what the complementary color of each color is. In this color wheel you can see the complementary colors at the opposite of each other.
Maybe you know another color wheel than this one that I show you. In the other color wheel yellow and purple are the opposite of each other, in stead of yellow and blue. The artist Johannes Itten made that color wheel a long time ago and had to work with old paint with not very good pigments. A lot of years later science proofed that he was wrong and corrected the color wheel, like you see on the picture. Complementary colors are handy if you want some tension or action in your images. How bigger the contrast of the colors how bigger the tension will be. I will give you an example. Let’s say you have a photo with a foreground and a background. This is good: The foreground is red and yellow, the background is blue and green. This is bad: The foreground is red and green, the background is yellow and blue.
Contrast of hueI can’t tell you much about this one. It’s just the contrast between colors. How further away the colors are in the color wheel, how bigger the contrast.
Simultaneous contrastThis contrast means when one color is strongly present, the complementary color will pop up. If you have a grey little square and you surround it with a lot of red, the grey square will look a little green. When you surround the same square with a lot of green the square will look a little red. This isn’t very importing when you design, but I thought it would be nice to tell all the 7 color contrasts. If you design something where one color is strongly present, you now know the surrounding things might look like the complementary color. For example the red, is the background and in the middle is the product you want to promote in grey. If you really don’t want associations with green, you can choose a grey that’s closer to red.
Contrast of warm and coolOf course colors don’t have a real temperature. This concept is related to the light in the landscape. Colors that are close to red are associated with the sunset, while colors like blue are associated with a gray, rainy day. If you want to make a flyer for a sunny holiday use the colors red, orange, yellow and dark purple. The warm/cool contrast can also give depth to your designs. If you look at old paintings with landscapes or look outside in the summer you will notice that the objects near the horizon look blue. This is because water drops in the air absorb light, so the warm color disappears and the result is that it looks blue. Our brains know this (even while you maybe didn’t know before reading this), so also in designs blue will look further away than red. Here is some proof. In the first picture the grey square looks like it moves forward, while in the second picture it looks like it moves backwards.
 Contrast of light and darkThis contrast can be made by 2 different colors, for example yellow and purple, but can also be made of different shades from 1 color. If you want to make something look bright, or even shine, you should surround it with a dark color. How darker the surrounding color, how lighter the subject will look. The other way around also works, if you want to make something really dark you should surround it with a light color. This is often used on commercials with black TV’s, computers, MP3 players, etc. The black looks better on a light background.
Contrast of saturationThis is the contrast between bright and turbid colors, that are more close to grey. If you want the viewer to focus on 1 thing on your design, you should give that bright colors and make the rest more turbid. The focus will be on the bright color. Here is an example:
Contrast of extensionThis contrast can be made by using different quantities of 2 or more colors. This contrast will be experienced as tension between the colors. How bigger the difference in quantity, how bigger the contrast. The focus will be on the object with the less quantity. Practice with these rules a lot. If you design a flyer, change the colors in photoshop a lot and see what happens. If you make a photo, try to imagine how it will look if your model would wear a different color dress. You can even sketch with colored pencils your idea on paper first, see what works best and then make the actual design or shoot the photo. I hope you know more about colors now and think more about how to use them more in your designs/photos. If you have any questions about this tutorial, feel free to ask! | | | |
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| | 02/13/2008 4:27 PM | Alert
| | That's a great introduction to colour theory. Very comprehensive and helpful. Understanding colour is, obviously, the first step toward making good compositions so it's worthwhile to give this a read if you don't understand this theory well. | | | |
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| | 03/06/2008 10:57 AM | Alert
| Nice read about color... thank you for posting that. I guess we can learn alot about ourselves in the colors we use for our graphics, too. My favorite is purple and it's
pretty accurate but not 100%. I agree that understanding color theory is vital in
this line of work.
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| | 03/10/2008 8:58 AM | Alert
| | I agree - very good into to color theory. When I design graphics and web sites, I usually go with what I think looks good. I tend toward following these rules anyway, so I suppose I just have a good natural ability to work with colors. Perhaps that is what makes me a graphic designer. I wonder if most designers have a natural predilection toward color comfort, if you will. | | | |
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| | 04/16/2008 5:02 PM | Alert
| | Oh man, I remember learning color theory in an art class in college. We had to buy this huge box of these little squares that were each a different color and then do all kinds of projects with them. It was pretty fun when you play around with combining colors to make them stand out or even completely change and disappear. Ugh, I forget what those squares were called, but I'm sure someone else on here would know because they're used in many schools. | | | |
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| | 04/17/2008 10:05 PM | Alert
| | Ooh, awesome. This definitely makes up for the fact that I never learned about color theory in the many art classes I took in high school. How strange. This would have been so interesting. | | | |
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| | 05/06/2008 8:33 AM | Alert
| Thanks for all the replies. :)
Most people have a good ability to choose colors by nature, but theory is always handy. For example if you made a design and think "Hm.. it needs more depth, how do I do that?" , you can try to find some theories about it :)
Pity you didn't get color theory in high school. All classes about color theory I got were also not in high school, but at college. If you do a study about design/art you will get color theory for sure. | | | |
| galePosts:52  Orange Belt 
| | 05/11/2008 12:05 PM | Alert
| | I never even heard of color theory in college. Maybe in the arts courses? :P We did a paper on this once for our general chemistry class though. But that's about it. Thanks for posting this. It totally reminded me of how to choose colors scientifically. :P | | | |
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