- A lot of designers are confused, and even intimidated
by the whole topic of color.
Maybe you're one of those designers,
or maybe you're an illustrator or a fine artist
who feels unsure about either choosing colors
individually, or combining them into good-looking palettes.
So, don't worry about it.
There's a good chance you're just seeing color
as being way more complicated than it really is.
That's all.
Here's the deal: any color that you could imagine
has just three things going on with it.
Just three, only three, and always three.
What we're talking about here is
a color's hue, saturation, and value.
That's it.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Just these three qualities.
So if a color looks bad, it doesn't seem to be
getting along very well with other nearby colors,
then in the overwhelming majority of cases,
you just need to make an adjustment
to one or two of these characteristics.
Yeah, sometimes all three, but even then,
we're still just talking about three things
to look at and possibly adjust.
Three. Hue, saturation, and/or value.
And now that we've simplified the whole idea of color
into just three components,
let's look at each piece individually,
starting with hue.
Hue is just another word for color.
The two words can be used interchangably.
Hues or colors can be given fancy names
like periwinkle, pumpkin, fuchsia,
or they can go by names borrowed from the color wheel
like blue, orange, or yellow-green.
Saturation.
This refers to a color's brightness or its intensity.
A fully saturated hue is fully bright.
It's fully intense.
A desaturated hue is usually described
as being muted or grayed out.
Any hue can be any degree between
fully saturated and highly desaturated.
Browns and grays, by the way,
these are simply desaturated versions of a particular hue.
Browns are generally semi-muted
versions of orange, red-orange, yellow-orange or red.
Grays are generally highly muted versions
of any color, and they come in two flavors: cool and warm.
Grays come from the colors ranging from
blue-green to violet.
Warm grays come from colors ranging from yellow through red,
and these colors have been muted beyond the point
of being what we call browns.
There are also neutral grays, which have
absolutely no hint of any color.
And last, but definitely not least is value.
Value is how light or how dark a color appears,
or a shade of gray.
Value is extremely important because,
simply put, hue and saturation,
it can't even exist without a value to latch onto.
If there's no value, there can't be any color.
Another important thing to know about value
is that our eyes actually depend on value differences
way more than they depend on hues or levels of
saturation to make sense of what we see.
Value tells us where one thing ends
and another thing begins.
Value establishes clarity.
Compare these two photos,
one with clear value differences, and one without.
Yes, value is really important when it comes
to visual clarity, obviously.
Which isn't to say that all three components
of color aren't critical when it
comes to choosing and using colors,
especially when creating color schemes.
Hue, saturation, and value,
they're all extremely important, for sure.
But just know that without clear differences in value,
things start falling apart really fast.
Alright, let's wrap up by summarizing.
There are only three things to look at
when assessing a color.
Its hue, otherwise known as its color,
its saturation, which is how bright or how muted the color
is, and value, which is how light or dark the color is.
There you have it, the three and the only three,
and the always three components of color.