The Basics of Colour in Graphic Design

This post is not about sounding smart or getting technical about 50 shades of pink. This is merely a basic description of colour for the design noob. As I’m a bit of a design virgin, I picked the brain of Cape Town graphic designer, Juan Arenz, for info on the significance of colour in design. Seeing Juan in action, created a mental image of clouds and psychedelic colour & pattern explosions hovering overhead at the desk of a designer!

The first thing a designer learns is using colour and colour schemes; the basics of colour a.k.a the primary colours. It’s pretty straightforward as there are only 3: Red Blue and Yellow. These three colours form the foundation of all shades and tints. In other words, you use percentages of these hues to “build” the desired colour.

Then you get different formats of these colours, for example CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key/Black) and RGB (Red, Green, Blue). These examples are expansions of the primary colour model, giving you colour options of more than a thousand shades and also more control over your design. Some formats are colour specific, for example only RGB colours can be used for web development.

There are other colour models but it does get quite extensive; you might find yourself getting lost and spending days trying to find JUST the right shade of blue (when, in fact, you will probably revert back to your first choice anyway). This is a brilliant procrastination tool!

However, there is one that simply has to be mentioned and that is Pantone colours. Pantone colours are the result of a growing colour regime, it is a universal list of colours, breaking each colour and shade down scientifically through CMYK from its lightest to darkest and running one colour into the next hue, e.g.: from the hundreds of blues it runs into the greens or sometimes purples because, after blue, if you start adding yellow or red you will get greens or purples.

Juan Arenz is the graphic designer at The Computer Guyz, Cape Town. He also designs for the Centurion branch in Johannesburg.

* Paradoxicle *

Written by: Christine Kleyn 

Copywriter at The Computer Guyz