- Naturally, if you want to get good at choosing
and applying colors to your works of art and design,
you need to know a thing or two about color theory
and color goes deep.
Is it important then that you clearly understand that
color is a pulsation of Electromagnetic energy
and when wavelengths this energy
measuring 635 nanometers passes through our pupils and hits
the photoreceptive cone cells at the back of our retinas
information is passed along the optic nerve to our brain
to let us know we're seeing red.
Is it important that you clearly understand this?
Well you know, in our line of work
it's really not that important.
I mean, it's pretty darn interesting and all that.
But most designers can get by without knowing
quite this much about color.
So what do you need to know?
Well, here's one thing that's really worth knowing about,
the standard model color wheel.
The color wheel that's been in use by artists
since around the 1700s or so.
Why know about this color wheel?
It's because it's a really useful schematic when it comes
to understanding how colors relate to each other.
So let's start with the wheel's three primary spokes;
the Primary colors of red, yellow, and blue.
These colors are called primaries because without them,
the other colors wouldn't even exist.
Primary colors can't be made through mixes of other colors.
These are the foundational, starter hues of the color wheel
and all the other colors on the wheel are made through mixes
of primary hues.
When two primary hues are mixed you get Secondary colors.
Red plus yellow creates the secondary hue of orange,
yellow and blue make green,
and blue and red make violet.
Orange, green, and violet are the secondary hues
of the color wheel.
When you mix a primary with a secondary color,
you get a Tertiary color.
There are six tertiaries: red-orange, yellow-orange,
yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet.
And there you have it: all 12 colors
of a standard color wheel.
From here it's super important that you understand
that each slice of the color wheel, it's just a placeholder
for an infinite number of dark, light, muted, and bright
versions of that color.
For example, if you want to apply a red-orange
to a logo that you're working on,
you aren't limited to just this default red-orange,
of course not, you could go with any dark, light,
muted, or bright version of that color.
This brings up the whole thing
about the way colors are named.
Some of the red-oranges we just looked at, for instance,
they could be called things like crabcake orange
or cinnamon spice, or autumnal sunset, or whatever
and that's fine.
And words like these, they can be useful when,
for instance, like you're trying to convince
your seaside restaurant client that this is a perfect
color for their menu, right?
Crabcake orange.
But personally, when I'm talking color with other designers
and artists I like to stick with straightforward
color language in which case, I'd simply refer to
crabcake orange as a medium shade of muted red-orange.
This designer name for the color, it's less likely
to be misinterpreted.
Now, before I wrap up, I want to mention
one more thing about the standard model color wheel.
It's not the only color wheel out there.
For one thing, there's also a wheel that deals with
colored light and that's the RGB wheel.
And light behaves differently than physical
media like paints, feel free to google the RGB wheel,
if you're interested, I'm just not going to get into it here
since the colors designers deal with on the computer
and with paints, they behave very closely
with the standard model of color.
And speaking of the standard model color wheel,
you want one?
Well download and print the pdf color wheel
that goes with this video.
Maybe tack it up in your work space
or somewhere nearby, at least for reference
until this thing gets thoroughly embedded in your brain.