🔸 The ONLY Colour Theory Video You Ever Need To Watch!

you're about to watch the most important information I've ever said on this channel relating to color I've actually split the video up to different sections for easier viewing and the first section is a kind of before and after section where we add color To Mediocre design templates so follow along and have yourself a great day and here is the first design which is based around a gym or exercise poster now as you can see this poster is in grayscale at the moment and we want to add some color now I want you to think of

the emotion of the design itself and what it's trying to convey and what's the message that's being presented this is how you choose color you want to evoke certain animations and so you can relate back to the color psychology so let's have a look at three different examples of three different color schemes on this design which one of these do you think works the best when it comes to a kind of exercise or changing your life sort of color scheme try and ask yourself for a question why would this color work so here are some

keywords that relate back to the color psychology of the particular color scheme for RNG kind of yellows we have energetic excitement and change red kind of work danger passion or a warning and green can relate back to Natural Tranquility or healthy so when you want a design to relate back to a change of lifestyle or a change of anything and some kind of energetic movement oranges always going to be a very good choice for this kind of design also when you consider the design here has very energetic lines angled straight lines that plays back into

the color psychology here so for the second choice here we have another grayscale design and this is just a quick advert that will be promoting skin care or body creams and again we are going to look at emotion or connotations of a color scheme but when you are trying to sell or advertise or design something based around skin care products specifically aimed at women what color schemes would you go for this example I'm going to show you the finished design right now and that is pastel kind of skin tones as you can see we have

some darker skin tones here and then we go into pinks and also a really pale color here so why are these synonymous with beauty products or skin care products there are some very good reasons why these kind of colors are used on these products pastel colors a vocal kind of openness and a relaxation feeling when they're viewed they're very peaceful in soft colors which is great for selling things such as beauty products as you can see on the right the saturation has been upped a lot and it's too kind of aggressive for this style of

design also using pastel skin tones does relate back to the product itself which is trying to sell something that will make really healthy and really beautiful skin so these are the kind of things you do need to keep in mind when you're designing something you need to relate back to the product the message and the overall feeling for this webpage here I've gone ahead and I've actually colored in four aspects of the design in a kind of Goldy orange color the rest is grayscale at the moment but we're soon going to change that and actually

I'm going to give you three different examples again and you should try and work out which one works the best for the design so here are your three options to choose from which design looks the most functional from a color scheme standpoint and can you actually answer why it works this option is less to do with emotion and it's more geared towards a graphic design principle in terms of color schemes so one really useful method you can apply when choosing colors is to utilize contrast and one really neat way to do that is complementary colors

now these are colors that are opposite each other in the color wheel and of course these are contrasting this renders a design impacting but also these colors are visually appealing when put together and this is something you might want to choose for your design when you pair it with things like a motion and the message in 1974 K.W Jacobs demonstrated red to be more stimulating than green and green more stimulating than blue according to this study a person left in a red room is constantly stimulated with heightened awareness and elevated heart rate and in 1981

Richard cooler showed in studies that color had a great effect on EEG readings and heart rates as well as emotional perceptions of objects so color does have a direct physical response on our bodies and can actually play on our emotions but here's the first very important thing you want to keep in mind as a designer it isn't necessarily the color that's important brightness and low saturation creates a soft feeling whereas dimness and high saturation creates a hard or strong feeling also weaker contrast and weaker saturation conveys calmness as opposed to a stronger contrast and saturation

which convey activity it's why pastel colors are often given to baby things or are considered by some to be calming because they lack saturation and as you can see things do start to become a bit tricky when it comes to the use of color and color theory but only if you don't properly absorb the content in today's video and potentially you do take some notes let's just say hypothetically we're making a design for an insurance company now it could be a logo a brochure whatever it is using this knowledge you might then choose one low

saturation and two weak contrast these decisions will convey a sense of calmness which is great for conveying to the tiger audience that they're in safe hands and that yes they will purchase 100 Years of your finest Insurance knowing the message or feeling you want to send out with your design allows you to then select things like saturation contrast and brightness but let's go deeper with color theory even yet still in common color theory you've probably heard this a thousand different times the color red relates to danger but also to passion and lust to blah blah

blah yes to some extent this is true of course us but get this we already know that from the study mentioned earlier that red creates a heightened sense of stimulation being stimulated like that does a few things some of those things include changes in breathing patterns pulse blood pressure and muscle tension okay cool but where does that even fit into graphic design so when people are at this level of stimuli they're more likely to recall something and to form memory Loops it's like mini trauma and our brains are designed to latch onto Trauma from a

survival point of view many Brands and many designs use red or similar colors to grab attention and to create Hard Solid memories to the audience think of Brands like CNN or Target as example so for the UI and ux designers out there hubspots ran a study on the effect of switching website call to action buttons from green to red and they got some very very conclusive results the red button outperformed the green button by 21 in terms of Click through rate which is pretty major in the business World color theory can be fiddly and it

can be precise at times for example combining a vibrant red and green together can end up being unpleasant to the eye but if you lighten the red to a soft pink and then make the green less saturated and slightly darker it then becomes a decent color palette one that is immediately memorable and Visually appealing to use there is a spanner I could throw into the works right here culture culture plays a vital role in how people feel towards color red typically denotes love in the West in Japan however red is associated with wrath and anger

there are many different examples of how different cultures use and feel towards color but here's yet another spanner to throw into the works age and gender Studies have shown that women tend to prefer softer more pastel colors whereas men prefer Bolder colors it's important to note that this is just an average and won't apply to everyone in a group but when making designs and decisions on those designs we aim to kind of appeal to the majority of a target audience and not just the minority this should tell you that you absolutely must know your target

audience in terms of the age gender location what they like and dislike and what you want them to feel with your design and for this first section you're going to want to write down words linked back to how you want to make the viewer of your designs feel and don't worry if you're kind of lost it is going to make sense later in today's video let's take a look at an existing example so you get the idea so this landing page wants to make the viewer feel like they are in good hands notice how it

says we help you get more leads emphasis on that word help blue colors are strongly linked to a sense of security and it's why most Financial based brands use blue in their branding but a light and a soft blue like this one here is also quite calming so the words you might write down relating to how you want the viewer to feel are safe secure and calm notice however that we also have hints of orange on our design orange is a color linked to action and movement and so this will help to Usher the viewer

to take action and click the link so the other feeling you want the viewer to feel is a need to take action simply because the whole point of this design is for the viewer to click that button we want the colors to make the viewer feel a certain way when looking at the design sometimes there'll be someone who pops up in my comment section I hear on YouTube and they will say something like oh color psychology is rubbish and it's completely useless this is a clearly ignorant standpoint because psychology especially in terms of color is

used by pretty much every major brand out there not to mention that color psychology is something ingrained into the human brain and also into cultures around the world so to say that color psychology is rubbish or useless is very very ignorant and it's just redundant to be honest let's look at another quick example for this section this design wants people again to feel energetic and to take action it says accelerate to your blog's growth that sentence not only suggests the viewer to actually do something right now the word accelerate is in there which in of

itself is very energetic and again a strong bright color of yellow is used in this design and this time it's the main color unlike the touches of orange we saw earlier yellow is linked to energy and positive change much like orange and this is no coincidence it's color theory and psychology the next step is to look at your Design's personality and again we want to write down those words that best describe the personality of your design let's look at this design again and there is a lot of white open space suggesting a more minimal and

a more clean design the fonts used and the style of use is quite friendly especially considering we have a little message in handwritten text next to our model for this design I would write down a clean minimal and friendly and add these below the first section of words that we've made we want to build an overall idea or concept of our design with these keywords from here it's a case of just taking your words and thinking about color psychology so pop online and take a look at what each color signifies from a psychological point of

view and then match up your keywords to one two or three colors so this is where the fun begins and when we start to experiment with our color schemes I'm sure you've probably heard of adobe color which is a great free tool for creating color schemes but there is another website you might find useful and I think I want to share that with you guys and it's a sessions College color calculator let's just say for example that your research has pointed you in the direction of a friendly and a natural organic design so you want

to go for a muted kind of tame a green this is your starting color this is your base color you can then cycle through different color Harmony schemes such as complementary monochromatic and so on always start with that base color from your research and then explore what else can work and then what might fit into your design for example here the green could be the majority of my design I.E that main color and then maybe this pink or this orange could be the call to action focal points and other Design Elements so this is how

we do it we first want to think about the viewer and how we want them to feel with our design and then we think about the Design's personality before methodically going about the color scheme itself sometimes when you're lucky the brand or the client will give you a color scheme and then that means most of the work is really done for you but I hope you see how design can be a methodical step-by-step process and yes it's creative but it also requires some you know methodical thought as well one thing you might not know about

illustrator is that if you hold down shift and click the color menu a different menu is actually presented to us now I'm currently working in RGB so I do have the relevant RGB sliders but if I then hold down the shift key again and click and drag notice that I'm actually dragging all three sliders at the same time this is actually a quick hack to add tints and highlights to your color straight from the RGB slider panel which is pretty neat also when we take the color window something that is often overlooked by some people

is the ability to complement a color straight from this panel this of course refers to the complementary color scheme where opposite colors on the color wheel are paired up together so for example if I take this blue here and I use a complement button we should get an orange foreign ifty and time-saving tip in illustrator is a way to change an entire design color scheme with just one click make sure you select everything you want to change and then come to the edit colors menu here we have a lot of color options such as grayscale

saturation and so on and as you can see I now have a totally grayscale selection with just a single click one of the most powerful ways to use color in illustrator is to focus on global colors to use this option open up the swatches window and then select the base color that you wish to use as a global color then click the top right menu and add a new swatch make sure the global color box is checked and once you've made the Swatch you will notice that the icon has a white triangle in the corner

this is now a global color this means that whenever you use this specific color on your project and then you come into the menu and you edit it or transform it into a different color it will actually change across your entire design simultaneously foreign everybody has heard of color psychology and the rules attached to that psychology but do these color rules really mean anything in business and branding well yes they do but it can get quite confusing let's start with a simple rundown of the main colors for logo designs and how they can be received

by people from a psychological point of view orange is an invigorating playful color and it's one that will make your logo stand out from the crowd and it's often used to represent a positive change or action and energy red is the universal sign for excitement of passion but also anger now like orange it will stand out from the crowd but it can be seen as a negative kind of connotation in some cases it's a color to be used cautiously and don't worry we're going to look at things in Greater detail later in the video this

is just a quick rundown of the colors if you want to interject a thoughtful cheerful and energetic emotion into your brand or your logo yellow might be the way to go and again this color is very loud green is very straightforward because it represents nature growth health and it can be used in almost any sector of business blue symbolizes trustworthiness and maturity now you should be using blue if your brand wants to be taken seriously it's also a color that can be quite calming now purple is feminine but it also expresses luxury and is often

the color linked back to royalty so in shorts It's a pretty sophisticated and feminine color in Western Society nothing says girly like pink does but it is a lot more versatile than that you know if pink is a more vibrant neon version of its color then this can represents energy and a more modern emotion Browns will often make your logo appear rugged masculine and also serious in nature but Browns are rarely seen in logo design black can be slick and it's a modern and luxurious color to use on the logo and it's often used for

high-end brands so that's all well and goods but how can you determine the right color for your logo and should you even follow these conventions well firstly you should return to the data and the research that you have on your clients brand generating keywords linked to your brand is essential to the color that you choose understand the brand and also the typical custom of that brand and then you can Target them with the right colors let's look at a famous example and that would be Cadbury The Chocolate Company a recent study showed that 78 of

people who heard about Cadbury on Facebook were in fact female knowing this tiny bit of information is so so powerful because what color does Cadbury predominantly use in their branding if we step back to the color psychology color theory purple represents luxury sophistication and even royalty but crucially it's a very feminine color so The Branding of Cadbury would appeal more to females which is great considering what percentage of people who engage with a brand are female but it goes even further than that in the minds of the consumer the use of purple elevates the concept

of Cadbury as a brand to Heights of sophistication class and even royalty Cadbury didn't just randomly choose purple it was of course a very well thought out and targeted choice and this is how you should approach Your Design projects by targeting people with irrelevant choices just remember that research is King but then the question arises should you stick to just one color now me personally as a logo designer I rarely use more than one or two colors on a logo if you are a beginner then yes it is always safe and an easy bet to

stick to just one or maybe two colors but then what about Google or even Microsoft they have many colors in their logos yes these logos for the most part do work however the designer who uses many colors should know exactly what they're doing with one color is great for brand recognition and strength an example here would be Coca-Cola with their red branding but using multiple colors might be a good idea to stand out from the crowd the thing is it needs to be used in a well thought out manner which often goes wrong for novice

or beginner designers an example here would be the craft Rebrand there is a lot wrong with this logo but the overuse of color is one of those things now color can be used to stand up from a crowd in the right way but again it needs to be thought out and planned if we take a look at social media you will notice that many logos or apps do use the color blue so we have LinkedIn Twitter Facebook behance Tumblr and so on but then we have some outliers and one of those is Snapchat decided to

go for yellow as their main branding color which for sure makes them stand out of the crowd imagine if Snapchat Used Blue on their logo it probably would become somewhat lost in a sea of social media branding so something else you need to keep in mind when choosing colors for your logos is to understand where in the world your client is based and also where the target market calls home now why is that important well because different cultures will sometimes have different reactions to the same color whites in the West's kind of resemble pure and

a clean design whereas in parts of Asia it can represent death so again this comes down to research and just data Gathering simply coming to Adobe color which is totally free and then head into the explore option here we can type in relevant keywords from our brief and our client research and this will help us decide on relevant color schemes for our designs as an example if I'm designing a logo for a kind of modern tech startup this color palette right here would be possibly a great idea in fact I know I've seen such logos

use this kind of palette before in the past when it comes to Tech inspired logos this easy method for choosing colors is so fast and yeah it's pretty easy to do not to mention really highly targeted towards our audience if we've done the correct research the best time to use this tool is probably on Logo designs or branding projects or just when you want to evoke a very certain emotion to the audience but what about this color wheel here well I got this thing a long while back on Amazon and I think it was about

ten dollars or thereabouts so not too expensive but yeah this single color wheel actually does four very important things firstly it shows us what colors we get if we add the three primary colors to another color on the wheel as well as adding black or white so here if we add red to blue we get a purple as the example on the front here it also shows us from white to black in grayscale as it's printed out found along the bottom and all of this is just really good to have when you're designing on your

computer at your desk but the really cool thing is when we go ahead and flip it over to the back but yeah firstly on the back we can see in real time the complementary this split complementary and the tetrad color schemes it also goes into detail about analogous Triad and other Harmony good stuff but if you look right here we also have tint tone and shade of every single Pure Color on the color wheel this thing is really handy for people who learn in a Hands-On kind of way it's also good to have at your

desk when thinking about print design work and it also kind of doubles up as a frisbee maybe not the third tool that is used for color and which designers probably should be using is built directly into Adobe Illustrator when we come into the edit colors menu and go to recolor artwork make sure the link icon is checked and then we can experiment by Shifting the color scheme for a single design as a whole you can of course unlink the selection to move around single colors but if you want to make quick variations of a color

scheme of an entire Design This is perfect for that kind of situation now here's the next tool for color use and it's called pigment on the left we can quickly change the brightness and saturation of the selection and then hop into something we like the look of this is where this website really comes into use you'll notice at the bottom we have the hex code the RGB values but also the Pantone which is really useful and if we come up here and click more actions we can see that we're able to download the color choice

to three different useful file formats we can create and control the direction of a gradient to using just the two colors and we can create a duotone image with those two colors which is pretty cool we just need to search in the search bar find an image and apply the color as a Duo tone and of course we can also share the color scheme to somebody else now let's not talk about the other option on there which was use a logo maker with those color schemes because the less set about logo makers probably the better

but yeah this tool is best used for those who want a quick and intuitive way to make a cool Duo tone color scheme for your next project and the fifth tool today is a bit more advanced than the previous one palleton can look a bit confusing when you first open it but here's the main use case for this thing now we can do conventional stuff for creating color harmonies on the wheel and then off to the right we have color options related to those harmonies with the hex color codes and so on however if we

come up to the examples here we can see our selector color scheme and how it might function on real life projects firstly on a website design which yeah let's be honest here this web page looks like it's straight up from the 1990s but it is cool nonetheless I'm sure you will agree on that and then we can see it right here on some animator Graphics as well we can also export our creator palettes which is always handy to have of course moving on we're going to look at a Photoshop trick that will save you heaps

of time and will really help when using Color now I first heard of this from the great pixin perfect some years ago if you want to change the color of an obvious selection on our image we don't need to use any masks at all just simply go ahead and make a hue saturation adjustment layer and then select this tool here and Sample your desired color once selected you'll notice Photoshop has actually picked it out at the bottom here which then means we can just go ahead and change the Hue of the selection really easily indeed

and of course that's without using any masks this color wheel in particular is useful because it shows Hues tints tones and also shades the Hue is the Pure Color around the edge of the wheel and then the tint is taking the Hue and adding white to it a tone is the Hue plus white and plus black and finally the shade is the Hue plus black let's move on to the color grips like I've said before monochrome is one of my favorite color groups but it does have a time and a place foreign to make a

monochrome color select a hue and then add some black or some white to the Hue I.E a tin to a tone or a shade and then generate a color spectrum by using that one hue the thing about monochrome color schemes is that the eye you're viewing it brushes over them smoothly and softly because it's no real contrast in color so it's very relaxing and very appealing to the eye but this means that your design is not going to pop so to speak and so it's not exactly a tension grabbing that should suggest that you shouldn't

use this color scheme for designs that warrant urgent attention select signs or charts and stuff like that but I find it's very good for Digital Arts and certain logo designs too complementary colors are maybe the easiest to understand you simply select one Hue from the color wheel and then locate the direct opposite of that color on the Wheel it doesn't have to be a hue though you can use a tin to tone or a shade but the key is to locate the direct opposite of that color unlike monochrome colors complementary are totally contrasting which means

they can be jarring on the eyes but they do grab attention also there is something appealing to the eye about them when using designs however you need to use them with caution try and use like a hue and a tint and then complement that Hue and that tint to have four different colors instead of just two this gives the design more depth and it's not going to be so jarring on the eyes a famous design that uses this scheme is a Firefox logo and also notoriously the drink Fanta uses a complementary color scheme too foreign

color on the base color and then choose a color either side of it on the color wheel this is a three color analogous scheme but if you want to use five just choose two more either side of the first selection much like monochrome colors and the logos do not have much contrast within them they have slightly more but they're not exactly complementary are they with that in mind these are again good for Digital Arts softer designs and specific logos I personally wouldn't be using them for a sign that says for sale or wants to grab

some attention this next color scheme requires that you find the color that you wish to use for your design then move four spaces leaving three gaps in between and then do that again around the color wheel you then have three different colors evenly spaced out around the wheel traded colors need to be used very wisely because they're very contrasting and a design can be overpowering to the eyes when using the scheme so I again suggest to experiment with tints and maybe tones and shades they are great for charts and infographics but make sure that text

and information isn't lost due to the high contrast of color one famous logo that utilizes this color scheme is the Burger King logo and it's a very attentions you can design in terms of color foreign ln today we have split complementary and this is where you choose a color from the color wheel then move directly opposite but take two colors on either side of the opposite color this color scheme is quite obscure and is very difficult to get a good balance in terms of color for your design it can work however but it would require

experimentation and playing around with tint somewhat as you can see on this web design page apart from the cyan and the white everything is split complementary and it does actually work pretty well now if you haven't got enough color goodness from today's video you can always click the video on screen now which will provide more educational content but until next time guys design your future today peace