While typography is key within design, colour can be used in many different ways within a design. It can be used to highlight specific information that could have been missed. It can also be used to evoke emotions within the reader and gives the designer with unlimited opportunities of what they can do with it.
Similar to typography, designers have many tools they can use when adding colour to their designs, specifically Adobe Colour. It allows the user to pick a base colour and then shows the different colour relationships it has, which would then complement the base.
Analogous colours are those that sit next to each other on the colour wheel. These will give a balanced look due to the colours being an even mix of the two and create comfortable designs.
Complementary colours are pairs of colours that when mixed, cancel each other out by producing a grayscale colour. When placed side by side they create a strong contrast.
Subtractive and Additive colours are a new concept to me. I had seen the terms CMYK and RGB models around, but didn’t realise what they meant. How CMYK is subtractive and RGB is additive. Subtractive colour would be used for printing, silk-screening, painting and other mediums that add pigments. Whereas additive colour is used for television, mobile phones, tablets and computer monitors because they are emissive devices which start with darkness and then add coloured light to create the colour spectrum.
When designing with colour, something which can be overlooked is how people are affected by colour blindness, with 8% of men and 0.5% of women having some form of colour blindness. To put this into perspective and see how it would affect these people, I chose a website I would use regularly and placed it into a colour blind page filter to she how it changed the look of it. I was surprised by how the clothing on the website seemed completely different to what they were before, so this is something that must be kept in mind when designing.
When choosing colour, designers have to be aware of what way the colours are viewed by different cultures. Red is often used as a symbol of danger, but in South Africa is symbolises mourning and is used for weddings and funerals in China. Yellow is often a colour that is looked on with a cheery and warm feeling, but in France and Germany it signifies jealously and betrayal. Blue in Western cultures is associated with feeling melancholy, but in middle Eastern countries it means safety and protection. So depending where their designs are being published, designers have to keep these views and beliefs in mind.
Josef Albers:
Albers (1888-1976) was a German-born artist and educator who taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College and is considered one of the most influential teachers of visual arts during the 20th century. Albers once said “in visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is-as it physically is. This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art”. It was because of this mindset, he changed how designers worked with and used colour. Ho looked at when the same colour was placed onto different coloured backgrounds, it made the same colour look like two different ones. A modern example of this is the image of a dress which appear white and gold to some, but black and blue to others.
Another tool that designers can use is the Material Colour System, which will give them a primary and secondary colour, as well as a primary variant and secondary variant which they can then use to begin adding colour to their designs. On top of this, they are provided with layout ideas.
TASK…
Using this tool, I looked a few thumbnails focusing solely on the colour. Then using this, I created a thumbnail with a similar layout to those given by Material.. I tried to choose a colour which complemented the imagery as well as the other colours.
It is obvious that colour holds a lot of potential in helping designs improve, but if used incorrectly, it can bring a design down and turn people away from it. So, its important to utilise all the tools available.