 |
Precision Intermedia offers world-class 3D animation production for television, still images, web video, movies, games and HDTV. |
How to Use Color
How to use colors together harmoniously is complicated field of study and goes deep into the meaning of combining colors for a particular desired effect. We will broad brush some basics that may well be just what you need to use color successfully in your marketing, graphics or website.
How to Use Color in a Monochromatic Color Scheme
This is the use of a single color in varying shades. This can be a clean
and interesting look on a web site. It's soothing and pleasing to the
eye especially in the blue or green hues.
How to Use Color in a Complimentary Color Scheme
This is using high contrast of color by selecting colors directly opposite from one another on the color wheel (such as pink and lime green). This puts a warm color with a cool color and is pleasing to the eye.
How to Use Color in a Triple Color Scheme
This scheme uses three colors equally spaced from each other around a color wheel. It's popular with web designers and allows for a harmonious color scheme.
Remember to your customers or website visitors you ARE that first flash
of color they see in your work. So it's important to remember that how
you use color is the first thing registered by a person who goes to your
web site, looks at your business card, reads your billboard, or sees your
ad. If the colors are used in a pleasing way, they will read on -- however,
if the colors are displeasing or off in use together you may lose the potential
customer immediately. So first select your background color and then select
two other colors to use with it. Before you select any of the colors for
your project, review again the meaning and harmony of colors here.
Recommended reading on color:
Title: Living Colors: A Definitive Guide to Color Palettes Through the Ages
Author: Margaret Walch
Publisher: Chronicle Books (1995)
Comments: Spiral bound work book; shows 80 classic color schemes from art and design history.
Title: The Designers Guide to Color Combinations: 500+ Historic and Modern
Color Formulas in CMYK*
Author: Leslie Cabarga
Publisher: North Light Books (2003)
Comments: This author doesn't teach color theory or even provide a color wheel in this book; but the book does contain a large collection of color combinations that work together.
* Short for Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black, and pronounced as separate letters ("see-em-why-kay"). CMYK is a color model in which all colors are described as a mixture of these four process colors. CMYK is the standard color model used in offset printing for full-color. Because such printing uses inks of these four basic colors, it is often called four-color printing.
Thank you for reading our information about the psychology of color and colors uses in marketing and communications.
