Yes, I know that you see this everywhere. But, it’s vital when manually choosing your colour scheme.
If you don’t naturally know what colours go well together, then the colour wheel can come in handy. Take a look at it...
Now, there are two main types of colour groups that you really should be paying attention to.
The first group is called complementary colours; these are colours that are opposite each-other for example, Yellow & Violet, Red & Green, etc.
The other group is named analogous, these are colours that are next to each-other, for example, Yellow & Yellow Green & Green & Green Blue.
Now, in my opinion there's no real reason to know much more about the colour wheel. So lets talk about colour swatches. These are pre-set colour schemes that you can refer to at any time during your design process. Most designing programs have these within the program.
Colour swatches -
As you can see in the picture to the right, this is the window in which you can find colour swatches within Photoshop, there are some swatches already pre-installed in this program. But you can download more swatches on-line or customize your own, save them, and share them. I will be uploading some in the Resources area soon! so keep an eye out!
Professional Printing -
Okay, There's more to just setting the colour when it comes to print. So here's a few quick off-topic notes -
- · Contact your printers before you do anything! different printers requiredifferent formats, bleed & safety zones within the documents.
- · Fonts!, Now, if you want bold print. Use fonts with a bold option, and not try to set it bold yourself. This may be lost whilst transferring between programs. Also save your fonts on a USB Stick or CD to give to the printers so they have your fonts just in-case.
- · Prepare your documents for high quality printing by setting the DPI to 300 at the very least, and its best to save in Tiff's not JPG's.
Now the colour side of printing :
Use CMYK! I've made the novice mistake myself of sending my file to print in RGB. The printing company obviously printed it never-the-less, and it came back to me looking completely different to how I imagined it. If you are printing in bulk for a company, and it comes back completely different. You can't get a refund as it was your mistake for the RGB not theirs. So remember this!
Different Colours, different moods -
As we all know, colours are not just pretty to look at. They can be used to set a mood, or stimulate certain senses.
Black Implies power, submission, and authority.
White Symbolize purity and innocence.
Red The most emotionally intense color, red stimulates a faster heartbeat and breathing. It is also the colour of love.
Blue Causes the opposite reaction of red, it calms and reassures. But
depending on the circumstance it can be used for coldness & depression.
Green Calming and refreshing colour, often referred to nature.
Yellow Difficult colour for the eye to take in, but definitely grabs attention.
Purple represents wealth and luxury.
Brown Solid, reliable brown is the colour of earth and is abundant in nature. Light brown implies genuineness while dark brown is similar to wood or leather.
How to use and not to use -
There are ways in which to use colours and ways not to use the colours. Try and take these factors into consideration whilst designing and selecting.
- Do not pick too many colours to work with. Less is more.
- Plan out before hand how your colours will sit on the page.
- Do you really want to draw attention to un-important area's by using sharp colours?
- What area's do you want to draw attention to? (play with opacity and shades to negotiate this)
- Professional or Relaxed? (business's want to build trust with there clients before meeting them using there documents, remember this!)
Apart from that guys, Happy designing! Any questions, Just leave a comment. :] Thanks for reading. Good luck, I hope I helped. Before I go, here's a few links that could come in use to you.
- · An inspirational site that randomizes colours to give you that boost, may take a few spins to get an appropriate swatch, but try it out! http://swatchspot.com/
- · A website that purely just displays various colours and there names.http://www.eternasilk.com/EternaSilk_swatchcard5.htm
- · An online program that automatically generates colour combinations of your choice. Simply select the first colour you want to use, and it automatically generates your swatches for you. :) http://www.colorpicker.com/
- · Instead of colour swatches, how about generating an entire colour scheme! http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html
- · A mimic of Photoshops colour picker, but! with a twist... Its annoying changing the saturation, so this changes it for you. :) very interesting. http://johndyer.name/lab/colorpicker/
- · Various colour swatches and colour schemes database. :) http://nzexplorer.co.nz/colour_swatch_library/
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