Color theory is the collection of rules and guidelines which designers use to interact with users through appealing color schemes in visual interfaces. To pick the most desirable colors every time, designers use a color wheel and refer to extensive collected knowledge about human optical ability, psychology, culture, and more.
This article will introduce you to the most important lingo and concepts to get you started, helping you make better decisions applying color in your designs.Topics
- Color
- Hue
- Tint, Shade & Tone
- Value
- Saturation / Chroma
- Color Wheel
- Matching Colors
- Monochromatic
- Types of Color
- Matching Colors
- Emphasis
- Color Consistency
- Color Meanings
- Color Relativity
Color?
Color is perception. Our eyes see something (the sky, for example), and data sent from our eyes to our brains tells us it’s a certain color (blue). Objects reflect light in diverse combinations of wavelengths. Our brains pick up on those wavelength combinations and translate them into the happening we call color.
Hue
A hue is any color on the color wheel.
A lot of the time when people talk about colors, they are actually talking about hues—which are the basic, “pure” colors, any color that is within the visible light spectrum. The healthy human eye can see 2.3M hues; tons of variations of reds, blues, greens and so on.
Tint, Shade & Tone
Hues don’t have tint or shade—which means they lack any additions of white or black. That’s why we are talking about tints and shades of particular hues. The tint is about the amount of white in a color. When you mix a color with white you are tinting it. More white leads to the increased lightness of the hue. Adding white to the pure hue decreases its saturation, making the hueless intense.
Shade on the other hand is about the amount of black in a color. When you mix a color with black you are shading it. This results in a rich, often darker, more intense color due to the overpowering nature of black pigments. Many blacks change the characteristics of a hue, even though small amounts. Therefore they should be used sparingly.
As you can see in the spectrum below, in the middle you’ll find the pure hue. Towards the left, we add more and more white by tinting it and to the right, we are shading the red with black.
