Color
Color can be extremely intimidating, but is absolutely the best way to add visual interest to your images. Most of what you’ll learn about color, you’ll learn through research, exploration, and trial-and-error. But a basic understanding of color theory will help you make more secure and informed color decisions – and help you break the rules more effectively when the opportunity arises.
Primary Colors
Primary colors are the colors that are mixed to make all other colors. Astute observers will notice that when we talk about ink, those colors are cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and that when we talk about light, those colors are red, blue and green. Traditionally, in basic color theory (and as you learned in grade school) red, yellow, and blue are considered the primary colors.
Secondary Colors
Secondary colors are the colors that are made by combining an even amount of two primary colors. Red and yellow make orange, yellow and blue make green, blue and red make purple.
Tertiary Colors
Tertiary colors fall in between the primary and secondary colors on the color wheel. These include fuschia (red-purple), chartreuse (yellow-green) and aqua (blue-green).
Color choice is never random – all colors exist in the context of how they’ve been used before. When you see pink, you may think femininity. When you see green, you may think of recycling. Many color associations are pretty intuitive, but here is a list of some common ones. Note – these are all western interpretations and may have very different meanings in other cultures. For example, in China, red is the color of celebration, and white is the color of death and mourning. Zeven Design has a great resource page to help you understand color associations and meanings in greater depth, which helped us a lot in our research for this page.
Red
Heat, Passion, War, Aggression, Love, Blood, Sexuality
Orange
Harvest/Autumn, Strength, Creativity, Enthusiasm
Yellow
Sunshine, Joy, Warmth, Childishness, Caution
Green
Freshness, The Environment, Money, Envy, Growth, Peace
Blue
Freshness, Water, Peace, Cleanliness, Introspection
Purple
Royalty, Mystique, Power, Energy, Pride, Kindness
Pink
Femininity, Love, Passion, Energy
Black
Elegance, Death/Mourning, Slimness, Space
White
Purity, Peace, Cold, Surrender, Space, Cleanliness
RGB
RGB is used for files displayed on computers. It composes all colors out of red, green, and blue light.
CMYK
CMYK is used for print files. It composes all colors out of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink.
Pantone
Pantone is a company that has standardized color for consistency across platforms. Pantone makes their own inks for printing, but also color swatches so a company can pick a Pantone color as their brand standard and choose all of their colors – from their website to their front door – to match.
While you are of course welcome (encouraged!) to get as creative as you want in developing color schemes, there are some tried-and-true formulas that will help you create visually appealing combinations around a base color. Adobe Color is an amazing free tool to help you explore these formulas. We used it to create the color schemes below around the same shade of aqua (center) so you can see the various color harmonies side-by-side.
Analogous
Analagous color schemes use colors that are next to each other on the color wheel.
Complementary
Complementary color schemes use colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel.
Compound
This one combines the previous two – two adjacent colors and their complementary pairs.
Monochrome
There are two interpretations of the word "monochrome" – here it's taken to mean variations of the same color (here, green). For the other definition, see "shades."
Shades
Shades uses various light and dark values of the exact same hue.
Triad
Triadic schemes use three colors that are evenly spaced around the color wheel, and shade variations.