Colour Theory

We began lesson 4 looking at colour theory and the relationship between colours such as on the colour wheel. This reinforced my knowledge of primary, secondary, and tertiary colours and also highlighted new words which I hadn’t heard before, such as analogous, split-complimentary and monochromatic.

Complementary colours – colours that have opposite hues on the colour wheel. One primary colour and the secondary colour (that is created by mixing the other two primaries) for example, Yellow (primary) & Purple (Secondary – blue and red mixed)

Analogous colours – Colours that are next to each other in the colour wheel and therefore have similarities

Monochromatic colours – All of the colours (tones, tints and shades) of a single hue

Split-complementary colours – Involves the use of three colours – a base colour and the two colours equally placed on the left and right of the base colour on the colour wheel

We looked at these four methods of colour relationships on adobe.colour.com and I looked at the colour #71E0BC which is a green-blue colour and what these key-terms would represent for it.

We also looked at how colour can be used in different ways, such as highlighting important pieces of information that would otherwise be lost or to signal danger. It could also be used to provoke feelings as yellow is often portrayed to be ‘happy’ and positive whereas darker colours such as deep blue or purple can be quite cold and have an eerie feel.

Colour Accessibility

Taking colour accessibility into consideration, we looked at a range of websites and compared how they would appear to those with various levels of colour blindness

We used this website [ https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter ]to compare before and after and I thought it was really interesting to see what regular things would be like without regular colour.

We also touched on colour and its cultural implications, looking at David McCandless Colour in Cultures diagram and how the same colour can be represented differently by cultures all over the world.

Colour in Design

We also considered the importance of primary and secondary colours in design and looked at what companies consider when creating a design: primary, primary variant, secondary and secondary variant. Using sites such as material.io and adobe colour, we were given the task to choose a primary colour and one of its complementaries and design a basic screen for web users on Figma. I used the primary colour #3939ab which is a blue shade and the pink complementary colour #f48fb1 to create my screen, using basic rectangular and circle shapes, text and a picture to mock up the screen, testing the compatibility of the two colours together.