Color Theory For Graphic Designers 101: Everything You Need To Know

If you’re a designer or an artist who likes to dabble in color, you need to know the basics of color theory. You don’t have to become a master at this, but basic concepts and knowledge will help give your work more depth. 

This article goes over some examples of how they are applied in graphic design and why they may or may not be effective.

What is color theory?

Color theory is the science behind how our eyes actually see color. It is not just selecting a color from a swatch book and seeing what happens. This is more about philosophy and perception, which are always important to know as a designer.

Understanding this will give you the advantage of knowing what’s going to look good together and which colors match and which ones don’t.

Here, you will understand why a lot of people say the color orange and blue don’t go together. The concepts of warm and cool do not apply to very light shades of each color, but they do apply to variations in hue. Tints, tones, shades and tenebrism can all work together just as well as variations in hue.

Color wheel basics

The color wheel is one of the most basic tools used by designers to create pleasing graphic designs.

This is one of the most common ways to show a color wheel, and it’s very basic in its composition.

Imagine this as a clock’s face, with yellow on the left and violet on the right. Yellow is morning; violet is evening. The colors are evenly spaced around the circle, but you will usually see them differently, like this:

This is how you commonly see color wheels because they try to represent not just hue but also value and saturation. 

So what is saturation?

Saturation is simply the purity of a color. It’s how much the color is without white added to it or black. Hue, on the other hand, is how the color looks.

To make the color more saturated, you add more of it. To make a color less saturated, you add white or black. You also do this through desaturation, which is adding gray to the color to make it less vibrant than it was before.

What else do you need to know?

Color schemes have been used in art and design for centuries. But what is a color scheme? It’s a variation of multiple colors that are close to one another on the color wheel.

They usually have strong contrast and tend to look more interesting than if they were placed far apart. Here are some examples of schemes:

A monochromatic color scheme uses only one hue and darkens or lightens it. It usually uses only one shade of that hue, too. The result gives a feeling of harmony or unity.

An analogous color scheme uses similar colors near each other on the color wheel and has a complementary relationship. There is no warmth or cool because the colors are based on slightly different hues.

A triadic color scheme uses three colors close to one another on the color wheel, spaced approximately equally around it with a third neutral value in between them. These are the most used schemes because they allow for contrast, unlike analogous and monochromatic schemes.

An additive color scheme uses one color, white, and adds variations next to it. It uses three colors that are next to one another on the wheel and have a similar color palette which is then evenly distributed across the design.

These are all basic color theory concepts and ideas that every designer should know. Being able to design well is another thing, but knowing the basics will help you out a lot.