The art of choosing colors
Color can evoke emotion, capture attention, and send a message. Whether you’re designing business cards, setting up a photo shoot, or shopping for throw pillows for your canary-yellow couch, choosing the right colors is important. Unless you’ve had a class in color theory, picking colors that go well together can be an exercise in frustration: Some colors pair up nicely, some don’t, and who the heck knows why? Here, I'll review a little color theory as well as how to choose colors using a gadget that dates back to the 17th century.
Color theory 101
A color scheme (or color palette) refers to the group of colors you use in a project, a painting, or your living room. Just take a look at any book cover, magazine ad, or website and you’ll see that it’s made from a certain set of colors. The designer usually picks a main color and then chooses the other colors according to how they look together and the feeling they evoke when they’re viewed as a group. There’s a whole science behind picking colors based on what they mean to us humans and how they make us feel, as shown in the image below. Those meanings and feelings can differ according to geographic location. For example, hospital rooms and public spaces are typically bathed in pale blue or green because those colors have a soothing effect, while a popular chain of truck stops (Loves) are swathed in bright yellow and red to keep drivers awake and alert, and Apple stores are predominantly white to reflect a feeling of elegance and simplicity.
Here are a few examples of how color communicates to people in the United States.
To learn more about how colors make us feel, pick up a copy of Pantone’s Guide to Communicating with Color by Leatrice Eiseman or purchase the Galaxy Color Map Pro ($15 plus shipping), a fold-out, laminated guide to finding and specifying CMYK colors (great for print designers). It also includes a color wheel as well as a color emotion chart (great for everyone).
When dealing with color, especially in software such as Photoshop Elements, you’re likely to encounter the following terms:
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