‘Colour’ Visual element of Graphic Design

Visual Element

 From what graphic design is, skills to be a graphic designer, design theory, education you need, equipment you need to the graphic design portfolio and interview advice.This series is for anyone at any level.So if you're interested in graphic design and considering becoming a graphic designer. Join me as I discuss series of graphic design topics.

So the graphic part of graphic design is made up of visual elements, the building blocks of design. Through the harness of our artistic expression we choose these visual elements and arrange them on a surface in a layout to convey an idea. The basic visual elements that combine to create graphic design include the following: 

• Line
• color
• shape
• texture
• space
• form  
• typography

 Whatever work you produce be it for a magazine, a poster, a website or advertisement, these visual elements will play a part in your design.In this article I'm going to discuss the second key visual and discuss color as a visual element in graphic design. 

Colour

So color plays one of the biggest roles in graphic design, it can give emphasis, it can be used as a mechanism of the organization, it can create impact and create a specific look and feel in a piece of graphic design work. When working with color it helps to have a good knowledge of colour theory. Colour theory provides us with practical guidance to help us mix colours and create interesting colour combinations and it all starts with the colour wheel. 

 

The colour wheel is a really useful tool designed to help us choose colours that work well together. So this here is the red, yellow, blue colour model which consists of 12 colours. Now if we jump onto the Adobe colour website we can see this colour wheel as more of a spectrum. This is an amazing resource to explore and create colour schemes. The address for this website is color.adobe.com. So the colour wheel consists of 

1. Primary colors
2. Secondary colors
3. Tertiary colours

and these can be split into warm and cool colours. So let's take a look at each of these.

Primary Colours

So first is primary colours. Primary colours make up the basis for the colour wheel here they are red, yellow and blue.

Secondary Colours

Next are the secondary colours. Secondary colours are made by mixing equal portions of the primary colours, these create green, orange and purple. 

Tertiary Colours

Next are the tertiary colours. Tertiary colours are made by mixing a primary colour with a neighboring secondary colour, for example if we mix the yellow with the orange we get a yellow orange colour in between. If we continue to mix the primary and neighboring colours, we fill the gaps and get the remaining tertiary colours. 

 

 

 Now if we separate the colour wheel we get two categories, warm and cool colours. On the right we have the warm colours, these incorporate the red, violet colours through to yellow. 

 

 

 

On the left we have cool colours, these incorporate the colours yellow through to indigo. So that completes the colour wheel. Now this is a really useful tool designed to help us choose color schemes. To help us choose interesting colour combinations that have harmony together or create contrast there are some colour rules we can explore

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These colour rules are referred to as: 

 

1. Monochromatic colours
2. Analogous colours
3. Complementary colours
4. Triadic colours

 Monochromatic colours

So first we have monochromatic colours. Monochromatic colours are shades and tints of the same colour. The monochromatic colour scheme is typically balance and easy on the eye.

Analogous colours

Next we have analogous colours. Analogous colours are those found close to each other on the colour wheel. Analogous colours typically always work well together since they have similar origins. Like the monochromatic colors they are also balance but typically more interesting as these colours have more contrast.

Complementary colours

Next we have complementary colours. Complementary colours are those found on opposite ends of the colour wheel. Complementary colors have high contrast which produce vibrant exciting colour schemes, as implied complementary colors enhance each other and typically always work well together.

Triadic colours

Finally we have Triadic colours. Triadic colours are those spaced equally on the colour wheel. Triadic colours typically produce vibrant effects. So these are some rules you can keep in mind when exploring colours. So that is the second key visual element in graphic design.