Color is one of my favorite aspects of design. Color plays a big role in the world. Everywhere you look there’s color. It is important to understand color beyond just basic knowledge of color and how they mix in the art & design world. Color becomes an essential tool that we use in designs such as in branding for companies, logo design, advertisements, visual storytelling and more. Part of understanding color is seeing the interaction it has with other colors.
Some basic understanding of color includes knowing the hue, tone, tint, value, saturation, complementary colors and the feeling color can create.
Hue: a color or shade
Tone: the distinctive quality by which colors differ from one another, a slight modification of a given color.
Tint: a color diluted with white.
Value: degree of lightness or darkness in a color.
Saturation: the degree of chroma or purity of a color, high saturation and low saturation.
Complementary Colors: one pair of primary or secondary colors opposed to the other member of the pair on a schematic chart or scale, as green opposed to red, orange to blue, or violet to yellow.
Some background information on color and what we know about color comes from Josef Albers, a color theorist, painter and educator. He studied color theory and Color Interaction also known as Color Relativity through his work. Albers viewed color in situations. A popular exhibition is his series of work, “Homage to the square” it reference his work and how he used simple squares of color to convey interactions of many colors. There are 3 principles of color interaction.
- Light & dark value contrast
- Complementary reaction or effect. (Simultaneous Contrast)
- Subtraction- dominance color subtracts from the less dominant color.
The image below is an example of squares I did for a class exercise on my own with some paint samples the small squares in the middle are the exact same color. Albers often did a three or more colors in his work.
This is from a class exercise I did when I first started studying color. photo by: Andrea R
There are many more aspects of color that go deeper into the understanding of color theory. On the link below you can check out Josef Albers’ App, it only runs on apple iPad though. It takes his work and gives the user the ability to create our own interactions of color and opens up the ability to study color in our own way.
Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color App
Interested in learning more about Josef Albers, check out these websites.
Enjoy!
-Andrea
In visual perception, a color is almost never seen as it really is-as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. esign is thinking made visible.
— Josef Albers
andrea by design 