mastering the art of colours

Mastering the Art of ColoursPrinciples of Graphic Design

Part:1

IntroductionColour in design is very subjective. What evokes one reaction in one person may evoke a very different reaction in someone else. Sometimes this is due to personal preference, and other times due to cultural background.

Colour theory is a science in itself.

Colour SystemsThere are two primary colour systems - methods by which colour is reproduced: additive and subtractive (also known as reflective).

In simple terms - anything that emits light (such as the sun, a screen, a projector, etc) uses additive, while everything else (which instead reflects light) uses subtractive colour.

AdditiveAdditive colour works with anything that emits or radiates light. The mixture of different wavelengths of light creates different colours, and the more light you add, the brighter and lighter the colour becomes.

AdditiveWhen using additive colour, we tend to consider the building block (primary) colours to be Red, Green, and Blue (RGB), and this is the basis for all colour you use on screen. In additive colour, white is the combination of colour, while black is the absence of colour.

Additive Colour Combination

SubtractiveSubtractive colour works on the basis of reflected light. Rather than pushing more light out, the way a particular pigment reflects different wavelengths of light determines its apparent colour to the human eye.

AdditiveSubtractive colour, like additive, has three primary colours - Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (CMY). In subtractive colour white is the absence of colour, while black is the combination of colour, but it’s an imperfect system.

Subtractive Colour Combination

Colour WheelIn order to make it easier to see the relationship between different colours, the concept of the modern colour wheel was developed around the 18th century.

These early wheels plotted the different primary colours around a circle, mixing different primary colours together in strict ratios to achieve secondary and tertiary colours.

Colour WheelThe colour wheel depicts which colours are complementary (opposite each other on the wheel), analogous (adjacent to each other on the wheel), triadic (three colours positioned at 120 degrees on the wheel from each other) and so on.

Three components of colourThe three component parts that help us define a colour are hue, saturation and brightness.

Different shades or tints, saturations and hues are all possible while still being within the yellow part of the colour wheel. As a result, there are three primary component parts that help us define a colour.

HueThis is the position on the colour wheel, and represents the base colour itself. This is typically referred to in degrees (around the colour wheel), so a yellow colour will appear between 50 and 60 degrees, with the perfect yellow appearing at 56 degrees.

SaturationThis is a representation of how saturated (or rich) a colour is. Low saturation results in less overall colour, eventually becoming a shade of grey when fully desaturated. Saturation is normally referred to as a percentage between 0 and 100%.

BrightnessThis is how bright a colour is, typically expressed as a percentage between 0 and 100%. A yellow at 0% brightness will be black, while the same yellow hue and saturation at 100% brightness will be the full yellow colour.

Colour GamutColour gamut is a way of describing the full range of potential colours a system can reproduce.

This is partially because of the nature of the two different systems, but also as a consequence of limitations in our technology - screens aren’t always capable of producing the same range of colours as each other, and pigments reflect light at a non-uniform rate as you reduce their saturation.

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