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You may never think about color when you design.
You may just think what looks good is what is good. Well think
again, because it goes much deeper than that.
This week I want to begin talking about color
theory. Before I do, I want to stress that some of this is hard
and true "Color Theory" as it has been written for the past 100
years. Some of it is my own personal opinion about color. As an
artist we must rely on intuition as much as we rely on theory
and practice. It's like a musician; you can teach them all the
music theory you want, buy you should never "train-out" their
ear. That's what makes them an artist. Let's begin this week by
talking about some really simple ideas about color and then move
on later to more complex ideas, psychology and practice.
I am going to introduce you to a term in color
theory called "analogous color". What this means is that you
have a series of colors that are the same hue, but a different
shade or saturation value. Look at the image below to see what I
mean.
Here is a series of brown colors going from a
dark shade to a light one. You should be able to feel a sense of
something with this color scheme, but we will talk about that
later. What we have here is a series of analogous colors. Now
brown isn't the best example, so let's look at blue.
Here we have the same series, but with blues.
Now, analogous colors can be any hue. If you were using a
greyscale version, they would go from black to white through a
series of grays. Technically, black and white are not colors per
se, but you get the idea right?
So why do you care? Well, you care because the
values you choose in your color scheme whether your scheme is
for print, the web, or anything is vitally important. Choosing
analogous color schemes is very useful for tying together
elements in a layout. You can use it to evoke a sense of
structure, simplicity and sophistication. It is also useful as
an underlying color scheme, for which elements can compliment
it. We will talk about complimentary colors later, but think
about how often you see combinations of blue and orange, or blue
and yellow on the web. Those colors are complimentary to
one-another.
The level of saturation in color is important in
making sure your color scheme works. Take a look at the image
below.
This is the blue image that has been completely saturated. I
used the Hue and Saturation command in Photoshop to do this. See
how different it feels from this next image.
The first image is not my idea of
sophistication. Typically, web sites and print material that are
trying to evoke calm, structure and maturity use soft,
desaturated colors. Full saturation is sometimes useful for work
that is aimed at younger folks.
Just for clarity here are the brown images to
look at.
The saturated one:
The desaturated one:
So that is your first taste of color theory. We
will continue to talk about this and how to work with color in
Photoshop in the next few columns. |