03 Introduction 04 Primary colours 06 Warm & cool colours 08 Secondary colours 10 Tertiary colours 12 Single colour use 14 Two colour use 16 Analogous colours 18 Complimentary colours 20 Split compliments 22 Fabulous colour use 24 Inappropriate colour use 26 Current colour trends 28 Tints, shades & greys 30 Neutral & Metallic 32 Fluorescents 34 Discords
Introduction This is my personal resource that features my exploration in to colour. As a graphic designer my interests include photography, logo creation, illustrations, typography, and magazine layouts. These interests are clearly visible in my personal research, however this does not make me any less prone to other mediums that feature variations of exceptional and disgraceful colour combinations. At the beginning of the course ‘Colour in Context’, I never realised just how much I could learn about colour in the eleven weeks that I conducted my research. To my surprise, there is an exceptional amount to learn about colour, and looking back on everything, I can now realise the importance that colour has in graphic design. As an object of my experience with colour, this book provides notes and images on the many colour schemes that express my newfound knowledge.
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Primary Colours 4
Primary colours consist of yellow, blue and red. From these main colours you can mix them together to create a large variation of different colours.
I have found that a lot of food products will include these colours in their packaging and branding. These colours make the food safe and enjoyable to consume.
In nature, it isn’t that common to come across these colours as they are usually green. But in fashion, designers use this colour combination to emphasis the clothing.
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Warm & Cool Colours 6
These albums ‘08 Electronic Beats’ and ‘Tycho’ are a good example of purples being used with warm colours, when added it creates the illusion that purple is a warm colour.
Warm colours consist of red, orange, yellow, and light green. I feel that in some cases purple can come into this category if placed correctly, because it has red undertones.
Cool colours consist of purple, blue, and green. In my opinion even light greens come into this category. Like the purple in warm colours, light green with cool colours creates the same illusion of being cooler than it is.
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Secondary Colours 8
Secondary colours consist of purple, green, and orange. These colours are created mixing two of the primary colours red, blue, and yellow.
Goosebumps is a teen fiction horror book that features secondary colours in a more than half of their book collection, this creates an eye catching cover that draws its readers in.
Companies supporting sports and health use this colour combination because orange promotes energy, green promotes balance, and purple is uplifting and calm.
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Tertiary Colours 10
Tertiary colours consist of yelloworange, red-orange, red-purple, bluepurple, blue-green, and yellow-green which are all the colours in the colour wheel that are between the primary and secondary colours.
I find these colours are hard to find in design, because every time I believe I found them, I always write them of for being one of the main colours.
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Single Use Colours 12
Single use colour in printed design is very rare to find, but in photography one colour can create a powerful photo that evokes that colours emotion.
The photograph to the left is a place called Jodhpur but is also nicknamed the ‘Blue City’ that is situated in the middle of India. This beautiful city has thousands of buildings painted in blue based on the orders of the city’s founder, Rao Jodha. But no one knows the exact reason why it is blue.
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Two Use Colours 14
Two colour use is hard to find. This is because sometimes you can not decide whether you can count black or white as colours in the design. In the wolf image, I would not consider the white to be apart of the colours.
This is a .GIF of a logo for a free three day music party. This features a series of this logo on two colour combinations. Please go to this link: https://dribbble. com/shots/2269926-1065
Black and white is a great example of two colour use, these colours together are very popular to use in logo creations, magazine layouts and everything else.
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Analogous Colours 16
Analogous colours are colours that are directly next to each other on the colour wheel. These can consist of three to four colours.
The City of Melbourne logo consists of cool analogous colours. Blue, blue-green, green, and yellow-green.
The above image is an illustration that demonstrates analogous colours very well. The colours are a range of red-purple, red, redorange, and orange.
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Complementary Colours 18
Green and red are a very popular colour choice for complementary colours. Mostly when it comes to around Christmas, you can see these colours everywhere.
Complimentary colours are colours that are directly opposite to each other on the colour wheel. Some examples are green and red, blue and orange, and purple and yellow.
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Split Comlementary 20
The split complementary colour scheme is a variation of the complementary colour scheme. In addition to the base colour, it uses the two colours adjacent to its complement.
You can find these colour combinations very common in nature photography as there are a lot of colourful flowers to take photos of.
I found a tone of examples for split complimentary colours, I also found out that these colour combinations (especially purple, blue, and orange) are very visually stimulating.
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Fabulous Colours 22
Opera is a fantastic display of a rebranding design that blows my mind away. Check out the video here: http:// blogs.opera.com/news/2015/09/ opera-new-logo-and-brand-identity/
On the left is a short film created by Walt Disney. I consider anything that has been made by Disney to be amazing colour because they always go into great detail with all of their animations. Here is the link to this video: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vyZjm5JCZL0
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Innapropriate Colours 24
As a designer I pick up on so many design flaws along with horrible colour combinations. Take these donuts into consideration, there are to many main colours here that distracting me from what needs to be seen. This ultimately makes these donuts very unappealing.
This sign is a good example of inappropriate colour use. When you come across a red sign you believe that there is something very important to convey, but here it is just stating something ridiculous and unnecessary.
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Current Colour Trends 26
The flat design has taken the internet since 2013, it is now becoming one of the most popular design choces for comany logos and websites.
The flat era is also one of my favourite choices of design. To the left is a video about The Fermi Paradox illustrated in flat design: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc
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Tints, Shades & Greys 28
Tints are colours that have had white added to the original colour. This effect creates washed out colours which can also be called pastels.
Shades are colours that have had black added to them. This TNW is a great example of this effect, because you can see the colour being gradually darkened.
Grey colours are the effect of dulling any colour with grey so that it looks very muted. This is widely used in photography to achieve eerie feelings.
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Neutral & Metallic 30
Neutral colours consist of many different earthly colours. So if it comes from the ground it is probably concidered neutral colours. This includes brown, grey, yellow, and light blues.
Metallic colours are colours that appear shiny. Many jewellery shop brochures will consist of a lot of metallic colours as gold, silver, and rose gold are all main metallic colours.
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Fluorescents Colours 32
Fluorescent colours are colours that are very bright and colourful. They can also appear like they glow in normal light or under UV lights. They can also be called neon colours.
You can see these colours typically used in dance party posters promoting some fantastic DJ that will be playing at a rave concert or nightclub.
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Discords Colours
In my opinion I hate discord colours because I don’t like the colour combinations. But I can admit in certain situations discords can work, just like this gem to the left.
Discord colours are anoying. Discords use intense bright colours next to each other to create a weird occurance in your eyes, where your brain is trying to balance out the competiting colours and you get sore eyes from looking at them.
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