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Paint your world in black and white. Blasé? Indeed, it is hard to dull the blue sky of an October day or the subtle shifts in blue of a river bend. Whether we realize it or not, color affects us psychologically and, as a result, physiologically. You are probably familiar with the expressions, “She saw red when….” Or, “I’m blue over you.” True, we do enjoy colors simply because, but they also serve as emotional triggers, as well.
Surely, because of these reasons (and because they are human, too), designers use color to trigger certain responses to products, objects, or places. In technical design speak, this is termed “color theory,” and that basically boils down to the science of color—how colors visually relate to one another. A popular tool among design schools (and artists in general) is the color wheel, a circle of the basic colors of the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. Secondary colors are mixtures of those, for instance: red + yellow = orange; yellow + blue = green; red + blue = violet. Complementary colors, or colors directly across from one another on the wheel, are yellow and purple; red and green; and orange and blue.
Not only is color important for the printed page, it is crucial to one’s contentment and comfort level in his or her everyday environment. If you worked a particularly stressful job, you probably would not want your walls to be red. Cooler colors soothe and calm, evoking more relaxed and open feelings—all the better for a workplace, right?
Thus, good design, including competent choices of color, is critical in our world. Designers must know which colors work best to communicate their respective ideas, as well as create amenable spaces.
Everest Knobel graduated in 2003 with a B.A. in Art from Furman University. She is an intern at Aperture Foundation in New York City.
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