Colour Presents the Designer with limitless opportunities
Colour is a fundamental part of design and can be used in so many different ways such as highlighting information or grabbing attention. Used in so many different components of design, colour has many implications and as designers it is important we understand these so everyone can use and understand the content we produce. We also need to understand how colour changes our perception using colour psychology and how colour theory can be used to make text or other colours stand out. Universal indicators use colour such as the traffic lights, gender specific products or the calories on food and drink packaging. For example my drinks bottle shows ‘green’ for low level and ‘orange’ for a medium level of sugar.
The colour wheel is an excellent way to mix colours and hues to create one colour. Sir Issac Newton presented the first colour wheel in the 17th century using red, blue and yellow when he discovered the visible spectrum of light. He believed that colour was the result of mixing lights and darks, red being the lightest and blue the darkest. By using the primary colour wheel, you can create green, orange and purple. These are known to us as secondary colours and the mixing of these create tertiary colours: Yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green & yellow-green.
Colour relationships are colours that well together. They are not necessarily the same hue or even colour but they contrast and work well together. There is 7 different types of colour relationships: monochrome, analogous, complementary, triad, tetrad, neutral, and random. However we focused on Analogous, Complementary and monochrome in class.
Analogous
Analogous colours are colours that have similarities as they are found next to each other on the colour wheel. These combinations often create a bit of contrast from the primary colour, for example: red, orange and orange-red.
Complementary
Complementary colours or ‘opposite colours’ are colours that cancel each other out when mixed creating grayscale. Together those two colours create an intense, strong contrast. They are known as ‘opposite colours’ due to them all being positioned opposite each other on the colour wheel, for example: purple and green
Monochrome colours are colours all in that use a single hue or tone ranging between the light and darks. An example being the primary colour red but presented with lighter, darker, brighter and duller versions of it.
As a task we created 3 iPhone frames in Figma demonstrating analogous, complementary and monochrome colour relationships using Adobe Color :
https://www.figma.com/file/6EWhV0243fdsyg3IkJ88uk/IXD101-week-4-colour?t=phqzYKjMJ8pyprbF-6
