Colour Schemes

When we are designing different ideas and illustration, colours play a very important part. Colours can be used to express different meanings and emotions in different designs. This week our main subject has been colour theory and understanding different schemes and effects colours can have.

We also have colour systems that we’ve had the opportunity of trying out the last couple of weeks. The two colour systems we’ve been using are RGB and CMYK. It can be hard to know what these mean from just the names, so here’s a quick explanation.

RGB: stands for (red, green, blue) and is a colour system that combines these colours together in the design. This system is used for light (not pigment) so the colours in your design grow brighter as you blend/increase the intensity. It basically adds the primary colours together, blending them with light, making your original colours pop and look brighter.

CMYK: stands for (Cyan, Magneta, Yellow, Black) and is a colour system used especially when printing colour images. Unlike RGB this system gets darker as you blend it together. It uses the four basic printing colours and that’s why it’s used for printing mostly. This colour system is «subtractive» making the colours darker when blending, while RGB is «additive» making the colours brighter.

Another part of understanding colour theory was making different colour schemes and learning about them. Here we had to use adobe colour and create four different colour schemes and show them on our blog. Here are the different schemes and how they work.

Analogous Colour Scheme

The analogous colour scheme has colours next to each other on the colour wheel. In this scheme the colours have similar features, functions and are comparable to one another.

Monochromatic Color Scheme

The monochromatic colour scheme is based on one single colour tint. It shows the colours variations in shades of the same hue. It is altering saturation and brightness of the base colour.

Complementary Colour Scheme

The complementary colour scheme is using one base colour and it’s compliment (the colour on the exact opposite side of the colour wheel). Here the base colour is dominant and the complimentary colors are used as accent. This colour scheme creates a combination of warm and cold colours together.

Triadic Colour Scheme

The triadic colour scheme uses three colours evenly spaced on the colour wheel. One of the most basic triadic pallettes are the primary colours red, blue and yellow and the secondary hues orange, purple and green.

This was some of the basic colour theory we’ve learned this week, with many more lessons to come!