Colors give the viewers emotion and feeling about the design. Colors help the viewers understand the layout. Think twice before selecting the color and make sure they go well together and are easy to understand. Far beyond your design skills or knowledge of different software’s. The two most important aspects of design are color and typography. Without either one of these aspects your design won’t be successful.
To gain an understanding of color and its powerful effects are to study Color Harmony and the color wheel. That will give you an understanding of which color is used for what cause. Such as red it is often a color used to gain attention from the viewer.
Learning the color wheel will teach you which colors go better together and it will teach you that the three primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. When combining the primary colors you get the three secondary colors, which are: orange, purple, and green. When combining those you get the six tertiary colors which are yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-purple, red-purple, and red-orange. That’s how you get to familiarize yourself with the color wheel.
Colors each give off a feel. Some colors like red and yellow give off a warm feel. Blue and purple are more of a cooler feel. Certain colors may have different levels of saturations which are determined by how much grey it has. High saturation colors are very bright and vivid, when less saturated colors are soft. When understanding this you can start learning more on how well the colors work your layouts will show.
Exploring the psychology of color will teach you that the human eye sees warm colors before hues. Lighter colors appear darker when they are on a larger darker color. Cool colors go further away, when warm colors move closer.
To learn more about these concepts the best way is to experiment. Also feel free to download a color picker that will help you choose the colors that go well together. And feel free to look at magazines and websites and think about what your feeling when you see the color combination’s. Many CSS galleries choose the website with great color schemes. You should take a look at that if you want to learn more.
Don’t forget the reading difficulty when you combine colors and the users that will be reading it. Readers want their experiences as easy as possible when visiting your website or seeing your layout.
Usually black type is sitting on a light background. But it can still be easy to read if you mix background color with text colors. Color can help add meaning in your text. It provides your layout contrast. The closer the type and background get to each other the more difficult it will be to read. So it’s good to take colors off of different ends of the wheel.
If you want to learn more about color. A great reference is Pantone.
Artur Kazak | Akwebstudio
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