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!