Fundamental of Color
Color Terminology: Color isn’t just color. Color can be divided into: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. Also into hues, tone, and saturation.
Primary colors: Red, blue and yellow.
Secondary colors: A combination of primary colors so the results are: orange, purple and green
Tertiary colors: are the colors in between so for example: yellow orange, red orange, blue purple, blue green etc.
Understanding hue, tone and saturation is important. Color in design is key and knowing how to play with them makes a design great. The most interesting part of this chapter was the “color association”; how the colors have their own language. Colors such as red, yellow and orange are associated with warmth/ excitement / health. Other colors like blue and green are cool colors/ makes people feel calmness/ safety/ and sometimes depression. There is psychology behind color and how we interpret them. Another thing that was very insightful and makes sense now is that “muted colors” suggest elegance and makes the product go higher in price.
CMYK (Additive color synthesis) and RGB (Subtractive color synthesis). RGB is used for web design and CMYK is used for print design. Getting the those formats right is important, if not you might not get the desired colors and for a more consistent and to be 100% sure, there is Pantone colors.
Pantone colors: it is a standardized color matching system. These colors can be identify by a number.
Outside Source: The Psychology of Color in Graphic Design
Going more in-depth with color and psychology, which I found to be really interesting by the way. This article talks about emotion and how it draws in. Culture and experience is also key and different from each human. For example:
Red in Western Culture: is color of passion, but it also has some negative connotations such as danger and Communism.
Asian/Eastern Culture: it means happiness and celebration (new year)/luck. In India it represents purity and in Japan it represents danger and anger.
Color Contrast was another interesting topic and it isn’t about 2 colors. (black or white). Here the only thing is that you don’t want the colors to fight each other, but instead you want harmony.
This picture I found is a good guide, but also knowing the color wheel is helpful to make these type of decisions on what goes together. Contrast attract us, it catches our eye. Contrast isn’t just about colors though, it can be through text and shapes as well.
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