The Importance of Color Theory in Graphic Design

Posted on August 30, 2024

color swatches of various colors to help showcase color theory

Think of your favorite sports team. What’s the first thing that comes to mind? For some of you, it may be their star athletes or a particular game you went to. But for many people the first thing that comes to mind is the team’s colors. It’s tough to think of the Washington Commanders without imagining their defining burgundy and yellow. Likewise, the deep purple of the Baltimore Ravens is easy to conjure up. But why are these colors so recognizable? Why do they stand out so starkly when there’s so much more to their brands? It all comes down to color theory.

What is Color Theory?

This crucial aspect of graphic design is a framework that’s used as a basis for selecting harmonious colors for a brand that will help it resonate with the intended audience. It’s built on the relationships between colors and how they can be used together. What purple looks best with the gold I’ve selected?

There are a couple systems that have become influential in the design world when it comes to choosing effective colors.

The Munsell Color System

This system breaks down colors into three dimensions: hue, value, and chroma.

  • Hue: This refers to the base color itself—red, blue, yellow, and so on.
  • Value: The lightness or darkness of a color. Light orange and dark orange share the same hue, but differ in value.
  • Chroma: This refers to the intensity or saturation of a color. How vibrant or muted is it?

If this system sounds a bit familiar, it’s probably because it’s the basis for color selection in several popular software programs. Whether you’re a designer or not, you’ve probably had to choose a color from a selection menu at some point. Maybe it was a list of presets, categorized by hue. Or maybe you used an eyedropper tool for a more precise selection.

The Color Wheel

The Munsell Color system may be wildly popular, but it’s not as recognizable—at least in name—as the classic color wheel. Organizing the colors into primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, it easily conveys the relationships between colors. The more you understand of these relationships, the better you’re likely to be at creating color schemes that have visual cohesion. Here are a few different kinds of those relationships.

  • Complementary: Colors that are opposite of each other on the color wheel. Their high contrast can make for a great pairing. We’ve lost track of how many brands, movies, and more have utilized a blue-orange color theme.
  • Analogous: There are colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. One example of analogous colors is blue and green, exemplified by this client of ours. 
  • Triadic: This refers to three colors that are evenly spaced around the color wheel. The primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) offer a great example of this relationship.

Psychological Impact of Colors

Choosing good brand colors is about more than just looking pretty or creating contrast, though. They can have a big impact on our emotions. Different colors are often tied to certain feelings, making your choice of color a powerful tool in design. Let’s take a look at the emotions and feelings evoked by the primary colors:

  • Red: Passion, energy, and urgency. Red is the defining color of love, and it’s also used to represent vitality and health. As for urgency, the color choice behind the stop sign was quite intentional.
  • Blue: Calmness, professionalism, and trust. When you want to calm down, you may imagine blue skies or still water. From the professionalism and trust standpoint, many financial institutions utilize blue because their business is built on those two things.
  • Yellow: This can stimulate appetite and attention. This explains why yellow (and its neighbor, orange) are frequently used in food marketing.

Despite everything we just walked you through, it’s worth noting that these psychological associations with color aren’t uniform around the world. Here in the West, we often associate white with weddings and purity. Be careful wearing it in certain Eastern cultures, however, as it can represent death and mourning. Understanding these cultural differences can help you design a fitting theme for a company or event—and even save you some embarrassment.

Using Color Theory in Graphic Designs

As we dive deeper into the color theory rabbit hole, we discover that in addition to aesthetics and emotion, it serves a functional purpose as well. A well-utilized color palette can enhance readability, accessibility, and overall user experience. Blue and orange might make for a striking logo, but placing blue text on an orange background could give the reader a headache in an impressively small amount of time. More than that, if you want your website, app, or other software to be ADA compliant, ensuring readability is paramount to that goal.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should stray from a good color combination entirely. If that orange and blue combination looks great and speaks to your brand, use it! Just be sure to set a dark blue text against a light background so it goes easy on the eyes.

You can elevate or detract from a design depending on the colors you choose. One important thing that’s often overlooked by amateur designers is the difference between the RGB and CMYK color spaces. Does your palette look good in both? Creating harmony in a design usually involves analogous colors or monochromatic schemes, while complementary colors can achieve contrast. Here are a few tips for finding that design sweet spot with color:

  • Limit your palette. If you use too many colors, you run the risk of overwhelming your customers.
  • Help important elements in your design stand out by utilizing contrast.
  • You likely won’t know exactly what colors to use without testing them out. Experiment with the relationships between different colors to find the perfect balance for your design.

Conclusion

Mastering color theory is a crucial skill for any designer, because color itself plays such an important role in the creative process. By understanding these principles of color and how they play into psychology and perceptions, you can create designs that truly resonate with the right people. When you’re making any design—brand identity, a website, marketing campaigns, etc.—commanding these colors will be a powerful tool in communicating your intended message.

Of course, we don’t expect you to master color theory overnight. There’s a lot to it, and this blog is just an introduction. We’re happy to lend our expertise to help you create effective designs—from brand colors to full websites—that will turn heads and convert leads. Get in touch with us, and let’s strike up a design conversation!

How to Choose the Perfect Colors for Your Brand and Logo

Posted on March 17, 2022

person designing logo on laptop

The first thing your customers or clients will see on your website is your logo, and when it comes to creating it, every decision you make counts. After all, this is the face of your brand and it needs to represent your company’s services, style, and core values. How can a simple concept do all that? It all starts with choosing the right colors.

Establish Your Brand Identity

Understanding your brand’s personality, goals, and target audience is the first step to choosing your colors. Are you a fun-loving teen-focused company, or catering to a more serious crowd of CEOs? What’s the nature of your product and service? What are a few upfront things you want customers to understand about your business?

Color Science is a Real Thing

Certain colors bring certain companies to mind. Why is that? Creative design and careful color selection make these logos and brands memorable. There’s nothing accidental about color choices. 

Color science, or chromatics, is the study of the psychological effects colors have on viewers. It’s accepted that green, for instance, indicates healing and nature and reds invoke more passionate feelings such as love or anger. Blue triggers feelings of calmness and loyalty, while yellow feels happy and cheerful.

Think of some of your favorite logos; what’s the color science telling you about the brands?

Use the Color Wheel to Find Pleasing Combinations

If you’ve ever cringed at colors that clash, you already subconsciously understand the color wheel. There are several ways to use different colors for contrast and harmony, and ways to use variations of the same color palette to keep your logo simple and clean. 

Simplicity is Usually Better

Try to stick with a few key color concepts. Remember, your brand colors will be seen across all platforms, from web pages to social media and print. Will your choices look as good in a large-scale application, like a t-shirt or billboard, as they do on your business cards? WIll the logo lose effectiveness if it’s printed in black and white?

Black and White for Elegance and Simplicity

In a world full of splashy colors competing for center stage, maybe black and white is the answer for you. This minimalistic combination can mean many things to your customers, including authority, practicality, and sophistication. Where colors require specific settings to maintain consistency, choosing black and white for logos and brand colors make them easy to replicate for any platform.

Research the Competition

The intent behind choosing colors for your brands and logos is to stand out from the competition. You may find that many environmentally-conscious companies choose greens, for instance. You can opt for a different color direction, like a palette of blues, to stand out from the crowd in your industry.

Got questions? Let’s connect and talk about it!

Top 5 Logo Mistakes to Avoid

Posted on June 21, 2021

logo mistakes on paper

Remember, first impressions count. Your logo is the first thing your potential customers and clients will see.

Here are the top five logo mistakes to avoid when designing your masterpiece. 

 

1. Poor Font Choices

Remember that each font has a personality, and it’s all about choosing the right “persona” for your brand. If you are a stockbroker, for instance, using the Comic Sans font for your corporation’s logo probably isn’t the best way to project trustworthiness and reliability. A party supplies company, meanwhile, may not want to present their customers with a dark, heavy font.

Match the style of your font with the style of your icon to avoid competing with it or overwhelming it. For a better selection of fonts, choose professional font foundries such as MyFonts rather than free website versions.

Choosing a font is more important than you probably realize. It’s setting the tone and the expectations of your business. 

 

2. Contradictory Messages and Unclear Intentions

The second fatal logo mistake is when it sends an inconsistent message about your company or brand. This emotional perception of your message is a combination of your font, colors, and images.

Since customers will associate your company with your branding, the messages and emotions you want associated with your business need to be immediately apparent. Remember, first impressions count. 

Let’s revisit our stockbroker. This is a profession that requires trustworthiness, reliability, and expertise. A bright design featuring a clown, for instance? Not the best choice. Our party supply company, however, will send a clear message of “fun” with brighter colors, lighter fonts, and maybe even our stockbroker’s unused clown.

 

3. Too “Busy”

If there is visually has too much going on, it’s forgettable. This logo mistake will also undermine the importance of your message and lessen its impact.

Your brand will be recreated in a variety of applications for your business, from digital to print. Keep in mind that a busy, complex design will lose its detail if its size is reduced. A simple, clean design will be far more versatile than a complex or “busy” design.

Stick with a few simple elements:

  • Your business name
  • Your icon
  • Your tagline
  • No more than two fonts
  • No more than three colors

 

4. Too Reliant on Colors

It’s tempting to want to make your logo really stand out with bold, bright splashes of color. If you’re too reliant on color, however, you will lose its efficacy when it’s reproduced in black and white. Too many colors also confuse the eye, making your branding appear “busy” and sloppy.

If your brand can’t stand on its own in black and white, it’s not a strong one. Create your initial concept without using colors, shadows, layering, or other design elements. Once you’ve created something that can stand out in black and white, it’s time to choose your colors.

Remember to keep your design under three colors, and choose them widely. Color, as we talked about above, play a large role in your logo’s intent. Certain colors convey strong emotions, such as red or black. 

If your colors clash with each other, overwhelm your icon, or don’t match your intention, your logo will be far less effective.

 

5. Neglecting Visual Hierarchy

We’ve all come across words painted on the road near an intersection that read “stop here,” with the word “here” overtop the word “stop.” The idea is that you theoretically should read the words in the order that your car approaches them, reading “stop” before “here.” The majority of people, however, will read the words painted on our theoretical road from top to bottom: “here stop.” But why?

We are all programmed to visualize things in a certain way, seeing bright colors or large, bold writing before noticing smaller writing or duller colors. This programming creates a logical way to consume information. Visual hierarchy is a design element that uses this logic to encourage a viewer to read or notice important information first.

Think about visual hierarchy. What part of your design catches your eye? Does the flow make logical sense? Are the important pieces being overshadowed by bright colors or other strong design elements? 

 

Want to avoid these common logo mistakes?

Whether you’re thinking of a complete overhaul or simply giving your existing one an update, ArachnidWorks has talented creative teams ready to help. Let us help you design your next logo to help you stand out from the competition.