Imagine what our world would be like without color.
Grey sky.
Black sea.
White grass.
How dull!
While value is a great way to influence the mood, create interest and add depth to a project, color can be critical to a design’s success or failure. Food would certainly not look as appetizing in black and white, and I’m sure you ladies wouldn’t buy that red dress without knowing whether it’s an orange-red or a blue-red.
What is Color?
We could get into the scientific explanation of color, light waves and all that, but we are talking color in terms of design and visual arts. Color for our purposes can be defined in the terms hue and saturation.
The hue is what most people think of as color, red, blue, yellow, etc. The saturation is how pure, or bright the color is; how much white or black is mixed in with the hue, which is also sometimes referred to as a tint (white) or a shade (black). Generally people assign different adjectives to the saturation of a color, like pastel blue or candy apple red.
How to use Color
Color can be used to…
- Create a mood
- Add meaning
- Emphasize/focus
- Guide the eye
Create a Mood
Color has the great ability to influence our impressions of a design and this is probably the way color is used most often. If it is mostly composed of cool colors—green, blue and purple—we can feel calm or depressed, depending on how they are used. Warm colors—red, orange and yellow—make us feel strong, passionate emotions like anger or desire.
Restaurants, especially fast food companies, have this idea down pat. Ever notice the colors they like to use for their logos? Red and yellow (think of McDonald’s and Carl’s Jr—or Hardee’s for those of you on the East Coast). These colors are warm, which is the way we want our food served, and energizing, which is what we want our food to do to us. There are even theories that yellow is associated with stimulating the appetite.
Add Meaning
Colors are chock full of meaning. Most of the time people are oblivious to a color’s meaning in a layout and, true, sometimes it may not even be important because color is being used to create a mood. But the designer should always be aware of his or her use of color regardless. A single color can have several different meanings depending on the context and its saturation. Green can be symbolic of envy, sickness and jealousy, or it can connote new life, growth and health.
The meanings of colors in various cultures can be fascinating to study. Did you realize that while white in western cultures connotes innocence and purity, in eastern cultures it is the color worn at funerals because it symbolizes mourning? Red is another tricky color in western vs. eastern cultures. In our western culture, if a bride were to wear a red wedding dress, it would symbolize her impurity (remember The Scarlet Letter?), where in eastern cultures, red is the color of prosperity, happiness and marriage.
Emphasize/Focus
Warm colors tend to pop out of the page or screen. These can be used to emphasize part of the layout. Cool colors recede into the background and can also serve to accent the warm colors by creating contrast.
Vertigo has some of the best examples of using color to emphasize. Do you remember the scene when Scottie first sees Madeleine at Ernie’s? The whole room is crimson red and all the patrons are in neutral colors, black, tan, grey and white. But there’s Madeleine, in a stunning green trimmed dress. You can’t help but notice her!
Guide the Eye
By placing colors, especially the warmer tones, in strategic places in a layout, you can guide the audience through and create direction. Think of making subtitles red, creating a color-coded information layout or adding spots of red in an image that lead people through the design the way you want. They will probably not notice it, but you will be able to control in which order they see certain aspects of an image. Also keep in mind how color and value work together to make this happen.
You can read more about the elements of design in the Real World Example series:
I remember doing a bit about colour theory at college. What I found quite interesting is that if you are painting a picture of an object its shadow should contain elements of it complementary colour for instance a yellow object should have a shadow which has traces of purple. I used to paint quite a bit and tried to take note of this during the process.
Yes, I remember learning about that with colored pencils now that you say it. Weird isn’t it? I never learned why that is though. I do remember that shadows should never be pure black/grey. I’ve tried using just black/grey in shadows and it does look strange. It’s too dark! I usually mix in some blue, but I had forgotten about the complimentary color bit. Thanks for the reminder!