The Art of Color Theory and Why Every Designer Should Learn It
My favorite color is purple. It's my favorite because I think purple looks so sick if designed correctly. One of my favorite purple-based designs is the Minnesota Vikings jersey. I don’t even really like football that much yet I think their choice of yellow, purple, and white is the best jersey in the NFL. Man, I love purple.
Justin Jefferson, wide receiver for the Minnesota Vikings
But I bet you noticed I said purple looks good “if” it's designed correctly. This is for a good reason. Colors need to be put together in a way that complements each other. As a graphic designer, it's important to learn such a distinction. It's one of the main fundamentals of creating good graphic design. So what do we call this idea? Color Theory.
What is Color Theory and What’s a Part of It?
The Interactive Design Foundations defines the theory as:
“The study of how colors work together and how they affect our emotions and perceptions”
Color theory allows for the organization of different colors and their combinations. This is very important to understand because colors can represent several concepts. They can represent anything from emotions/feelings to cultures and backgrounds. Learning these things can help out a lot in your creations. “But there’s so many, how can you tell how to choose which to pair?” I hear you say. Let's organize. There are 3 main types of categories for colors
Primary (red, yellow, blue)
Secondary (purple, orange, green)
Tertiary (or mixes of both primary and secondary colors)
These are your foundations. You change these colors by different means. Hue, saturation (vibrantness), and value (brightness) are ways you control the outcome of color, resulting in different shades of the same color. When it comes to color combinations, ArtsTillDeath research shows different types of color combinations based on the color wheel. These include:
Complementary Colors
Analogous Colors
Split Complementary Colors
Triadic Colors
Side Complementary Colors
Double Complementary Colors
Square Tetradic Colors
Double Split Complementary Colors
A Good and Bad Use of Color Theory in Design
A good example of good color theory is Coca-Cola’s logo design. Let's analyze it. The use of red and white suggests a bold and expressive logo, meant to draw in a person’s attention. Red especially is common in other food brands like McDonalds or KFC. Making the text red allows for the name to stand out as well.
Good Example of Color Theory in Design
A bad example of color theory is Cazz’s Sports Bar's old logo. They are a local bar in Levittown, Pennsylvania. The colors themselves can be a fine combination, but with all of them being bright neon, the colors collide too much. Shubham Kulkarni describes it best in his Bad Color Combinations to Avoid article about how while a design can have bright neons, “too much neon can be too much for your audience”. Changing the saturation or value would be a good solution for this logo.
What Color Theory Does for Designers
Color theory allows for understanding different colors to see if they fit the design. And depending on your graphic work, your colors should match what you are going for. If you want to create an environmental design, earth tones like green and brown would fit the theme. If you are making a logo, your colors should be contrasting rather than similar, to stand out amongst competitors. If you're making a graphic poster, your colors should be one of the focus points of the design, to catch people’s attention.
A design relies heavily on its colors. Without studying how color is represented or what makes a good combination of colors, your design can fall apart. Color theory tends to be one of the main focuses in early graphic design studies. So I hope this helps show an understanding of why color theory is important and why designers need to know it. And once you realize how much thought goes into color theory, it's amazing to see how designs everyone can stand out in a world of colors.
Thanks for reading!
