Mastering Colour I
A practical guide for designers
In this 2-part blog series I will guide you through building unique colour schemes for use in graphic, print and textile design.
I will steer from the obvious side of colour theory and forego the “red reads as danger and passion being commonly used as an alert colour in graphic design” type of statements and focus instead on how a designer without extensive colour skills could confidently develop them in order to create palettes that convey a specific mood, concept or trend, without resorting to chromatic clichés.
Working with colour, in practice, isn’t as easy as it seems.
I decided to write this blog series on colour because I started noticing a pattern over the last 2 years or so: apparently the way I use colour strikes a good impression with clients and fellow designers. Nowadays colour comes quite effortlessly to me however it wasn’t always the case. You see, working with colour is exactly like drawing or speaking a foreign language: the more your train it, the better you become at it.
As adults most of us master colour well enough to leave the house in a not-too-outlandish attire, because we are exposed to fashion, publicity and get dressed everyday. Yet most of us struggle to decorate our homes whenever we intend to steer away from neutrals as well as when creating unique colour schemes for illustration or graphic design projects.
This happens because of exposure. When you get exposed to visual languages and experiment within those visual codes (e.g. pairing tops with bottoms, outwear and shoes on a daily basis) you start getting… fluent. However when we get to decorate our first home we often feel lost in the soft furnishing section. After all we’ve never done it before.
Now let’s return to the theme of this post. As designers when we don’t know how to do something we usually figure it out one way or another. We try to learn and search for courses and tutorials but oftentimes, when the issue concerns colour, we take shortcuts.
Without having put much thought into creating a proper colour scheme before, the task feels daunting, boring or time-consuming and so ripping-off a colour palette from a blog, portfolio or Pinterest becomes incredibly tempting.
However that isn’t the best of ideas, and I am not even going into copyright issues here (even though proving a intellectual property infringement on a colour scheme would be close to impossible in most cases). It simply isn’t in your best interest as it teaches you nothing and does not empower you in terms of autonomy, two things that are too good miss in your career.
Now let’s move forward
If you are a formally trained graphic designer I am sure you have learned colour theory in the past, however between learning and applying something goes a long way. If you are anything like me, you probably forgot most of the stuff you didn’t have the chance to put to use. That’s okay, but before we move to part II, let’s refresh some basic stuff that will come in handy. Don’t worry, I’ll be more succint than your teachers and cover only what will serve us for practical purposes.
Hues are what we usually mean when we say “colour”.
Hue
Hue is what we usually mean when we say “colour” in the most general sense: red, blue, purple etc. Any mix between the colours of the colour wheel (which are themselves hues), be them primary, secondary or tertiary generates another hue.
A.Illustrator’s colour bar (enlarged and rotated), found inside the colour picker tool. Chroma is at maximum values.
Chroma
AKA purity. A hue with high chroma has no black, white, or gray added to it. The bar above features only pure hues, that is, with chroma at its maximum. Conversely, adding white, black, or gray to a colour reduces its chroma, so shades, tints and tones always have lower chroma than pure hues.
A good tip when designing is striving either for consistency or contrast in what regards chroma. Choose hues with chromas that are either exactly the same or entirely distinct.
Shade
Shades are hues with variable percentages of black added to them. They result in darker colours that feel “richer”.
Tint
Tints are the mix of pure hue plus variable percentages of white. They result in lighter colours that feel “softer” - think about the so-called pastel colours.
Tone
Tones are obtained by adding both white and black to a hue in variable proportions. They result in duller colours but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful - they are and quite a lot.
Saturation
Saturation refers to how strong or dull a color looks. Honestly I couldn’t find any good and easy to understand descriptions of what saturation is, so I will write what I hold as true: the less saturated a colour is the greyer it looks - think of it as applying a black and white photo filter gradient mask to a colour (see above).
Note: Tones of a hue may be darker or brighter than said hue however adjusting saturation does not impact brightness.
Temperature
You likely already know that magenta, red and yellow are warm and so are the mixes of these hues. Conversely, blue is cool. However many people say green (equal parts cyan + primary yellow) is a cool colour while others say it feels neutral, so I guess it is ok to say that in many instances temperature is subjective, specially when we enter “complex colour” territory and waters become murky with bluish greens, greenish yellows or purplish anything.
Even if not very accurate a measure, temperature is important as it impacts us subconsciously - cool hues calm viewers and warm ones cheer and excite them. I believe temperature is something quite important to take into account when designing colour schemes and that you benefit from playing with the temperature of different swatches in order to achieve “milder” colour schemes.
Faux Neutrals
Faux neutrals are by no means “a thing” but bear with me. Some colours are special. They surround us and we barely notice them because they are both ubiquitous and expectable. Colours like these include the dark green of a forest, sand, different colours of timber and stone, skin tones and so on. These colours aren’t part of a gray scale and therefore aren’t real neutrals - but they feel neutral. You may even be able to undoubtedly classify them as warm or cool, yet they are never extreme.
These tones are very useful to take into account, specially in projects that have to blend with an environment or when dressing a person: interior design projects, home textiles, signage, event decoration and fashion.
That’s it for today. In the next post I will show you my go-to method for creating palettes so stay tuned!