Graphics Primer: Color

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Do your graphic designers speak in a secret language? Do you wish you could let terms like Hue, Saturation and Value roll off your tongue? Aside from impressing your friends, there are practical reasons for learning more about graphic design.

Why You Should Care

If you’re involved in eLearning design and development, it’s important to understand visual communication. It will help you become more discriminating and sophisticated in your visual choices. You’ll better understand how to use graphical elements to facilitate learning. And it will enhance your collaboration with graphic designers, illustrators, artists, animators, photographers and videographers.

Starting With Color

Color is always a good place to start, because it’s a key component of visual communication. Color helps us represent reality, provide focus, express emotion, connect information, increase legibility and create psychological impact.

The perception of color varies among individuals. Color perception is affected by the brightness of ambient light, the colors that surround it and how an individual’s eyes and brain process visual information. It’s always good to remember that a certain percentage of the population is color-blind, meaning they have difficulty discriminating certain colors, usually red and green hues.

Color has many dimensions and understanding a basic color vocabulary will help you communicate about color in terms that most visual communicators understand.
Hue: Hue is the identity of the color, such as red, green or violet. It is the quality that allows us to discriminate colors. When we perceive a hue, it means its wavelength is in our visible spectrum, which ranges from red (long wavelength) to violet (short wavelength).

Saturation: Saturation (or chroma) refers to the purity, intensity or strength of a color. A vivid blue has a high saturation (the blue on the left) and a dull blue is desaturated (the blue on the right). Neutral colors are desaturated and without much hue, such as gray.

Value: Value refers to the relative darkness or lightness of a color and makes sense when colors are being compared. Increasing the percentage of black to the orange hue on the left transformed it to the brown on the right.

Color Tips

Once you understand the dimensions of hue, saturation and value, you can begin to understand the way colors affect each other. Playing around with varied saturation and values in a graphics tool will give you a better sense of these dimensions. Here are some color tips you can use, now that you’re an expert.

• Making Richer Colors: To make a color richer, increase its saturation by darkening the value (increasing the percentage of black) up to a point. Too much black will detract from the color’s intensity.
• Alternatives to Grayscale: When you turn a color photograph to black and white, you are removing the hue but keeping the values in tones of gray. For a different effect, use another single color, such as sepia or blue to create a photo of monochromatic tones.
• Improving Discriminability: Study the color spectrum or a standard color wheel. Note that colors next to each other in the spectrum can be difficult to discriminate. If you want to be sure viewers can discriminate between two adjacent regions, such as areas of a map or bars in a bar chart, then don’t select colors that are next to each other in the spectrum. Select colors that have one or two steps in between.
• Removing Salience: If you don’t want any one object or item to stand out among the rest, tone down the brightness and desaturate the colors. This will convey that all the objects are of equal value. Of course, the reverse is true. Increase the brightness and richness of a color if it’s meant to stand out.
• Avoid Color Chaos: Before selecting or approving a color scheme, think in terms of color relationships. Test the foreground colors on the proposed background colors. Because background colors can  make a foreground color appear brighter or duller, make sure you like the effect of juxtaposed colors.

If you have any tips on using color, please share them below.