Learning to Use the Color Wheel
The color wheel introduced earlier is a very useful tool for choosing colors that combine in a way that is pleasing to the eye. Following are some ways for using the color wheel to discover the most effective color schemes for your designs.
Using Analogous Colors – The Analog Colors are colors that lie on either side of any given color on the color wheel. Analog color schemes are widely found in nature, like the red, orange, and yellow of fall leaves (in fact, the red, orange, and yellow color scheme is the most widely used. For this reason, a site that uses analogous colors in its design usually feels more harmonious to those who visit it. It is customary to use analogous colors as secondary colors.
Using Complementary Colors – Complementary colors are those colors that lie directly opposite one another on the color wheel. In looking at the color wheel, you will see that these are the highly contrasting colors. For this reason, complementary colors are often used as highlighting colors, as described above.
Using Split-Complementary Colors – Split complementary colors are the colors analogous to a complementary color. These colors are useful for providing high contrast colors that do not stand out quite so much as true complementary colors, often resulting in a more harmonious distribution of color than you would get by using the complementary colors.
Using Triad Colors – If you select three hues on the color wheel that are equidistant from one another, you will have a triad. Triads are great for creating designs that maximize the variety of colors used without sacrificing balance, and they’re also fun to experiment with. You can get a lot of very interesting color combinations that are also very pleasing to look at by trying out different color triads.
Other Variations of Color Besides choosing colors based on their positions on the color wheel, there are many other variations that can be used to create more effective web designs:
Monotone Chromatic – Monotone chromatic color schemes employ a single hue and several variations in tint, shade, and saturation. Care should be taken when using only monochromatic colors in an overall color scheme, though, since it can sometimes be a bit boring.
Monotone Achromatic – Monotone achromatic color schemes employ only grayscale colors ranging from black to white. As with monotone chromatic schemes, care should always be taken to avoid monotony, although using an achromatic scheme with a single bright color for highlighting can be extremely effective.
Contrast
Contrast is a measure of the dissimilarity between two colors. In web page design, the amount of contrast used is one of the most important considerations. In order to make content more readable on all types of screens, you usually want high contrast between your text and background colors. Black and white yield the highest possible contrast. In using other contrasting colors for text and background, you run the risk of the text becoming utterly unreadable for some viewers, so a lot of caution is in order. Some of the more important types of contrast important to web design are as follows:
Contrasting Hues – Related to the description of complementary colors above, contrasting hues are most easily defined by their positions on the color wheel. Colors that are further away from one another on the color wheel display higher contrast, with the highest contrast provided by complementary colors that are directly opposite one another. Analogous colors, therefore, provide the lowest contrast. In choosing text colors, contrast of hue is generally insufficient for making text legible, and should be combined with some other form of contrast.
One type of contrast of hue is the contrast of warm and cold colors. Warm colors are those colors that appear to be close up, while cold colors appear more distant. As a result, it is often effective to use warm colors for symbols, highlighting, or text, and reserve colder colors for backgrounds.
Contrasting Values – For attaining very large contrasts, it is often beneficial to use contrast of value. As mentioned earlier, black and white provides the largest contrast of all color schemes, and is in essence a contrast of value. In general, very large dissimilarities in intensity can be very easy to read and harmonious to look at for text and foreground symbols, while low-contrasts in value can provide subtle background differences that are very pleasing to the eye.
Contrasting Saturation – Contrast of saturation is usually used for designs not requiring a lot of added emphasis. By using a set of colors with varying saturations set against a gray background, you can create a transparency effect that can be quite interesting.
Combinations of Contrast – In general, creating high-impact web pages involves the use of a combination of the types of contrast described above. This is especially true for text, since it requires high contrast to be readable. Working against the natural values of colors can often lead to trouble, though, and care should be taken when employing contrast of value. For example, using a color combination in which yellow appears darker than blue would look and feel very strange.
It should be stressed one last time that correctly using contrast is crucial for displaying text. Black and white, blue and white, and black and yellow color schemes tend to offer the highest readability, while combinations of red and green or red and blue can create dizzying effects that make reading extremely difficult.
Considering Color Blindness – About 8% of the population is afflicted with some form of color blindness, so this is another aspect that should be carefully considered when making color selections. For web design this is of particular importance, since the wrong choice of colors can easily result in a page that is completely unreadable for people suffering from even mild color blindness. The best way to avoid this is to design your website so that color is not the only visual cue and there is always a strong contrast between text and background. Using a lot of blues and yellows will also help mitigate many of the problems arising from color blindness.
Overall Impact of Color
The human eye is capable of detecting about 7 million colors. Some colors and color combinations can act as eye irritants, wreaking havoc on human vision and even affecting human health, while others can be soothing and impart an overall feeling of well-being. Consequently, the appropriate use of color can maximize productivity while minimizing visual and physical fatigue.
Harmony
More than anything else, the effective use of color is dictated by a sense of harmony. Harmony is defined as an overall pleasing arrangement of individual parts within any composition or design, and visual harmony is defined as something that is pleasing to the eye. The consistent use of harmony in web design actively
engages the viewer and creates an inner sense of order and balance in the visual experience.
If you don’t always keep an eye toward creating harmony, you run the risk of designing something that is either so boring it is incapable of engaging the viewer, or so confusing that the viewer finds it difficult even to just look at.
Always keep in mind that the human brain will passively ignore what it cannot recognize and actively reject what it cannot understand. Harmony keeps everything in balance.
A harmonious use of color can help you as a designer deliver visual interest and a sense of logical structure and order.
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