Design Practice Blog: Colour Theory

Today was all about colour and the mind blowing theory behind it all. We all bought in coloured objects that fit into the categories of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.

Our first task was to organise all of our objects into a kind of circle of colour, so that the similar colours got paired together, and then each colour would then blend into the other.

It made a beautiful display of some very random objects.

We also got questioned on our decisions of where we placed our specific colour (the group I was in had yellow to organise). It seemed like people had either chosen what they felt was the purest colour and then placed the other objects where they saw fit in comparison, or in some cases, the darkness and lightness of the colour was the most important factor when placing them.

Learning about the theory of colour, it was strange to think about what Fred said. How basically, apart from black and white, colour is subjective and is just the way the light bounces off an object, which then poses the question of whether a certain colour exists.

We covered the basics of colour, the primary colours, the secondaries and tertiaries, explained via the colour wheel, which also led onto complimentaries, and linked back to the way our table of colour had been set out. Complimentaries are opposing colours on the wheel - Red and Green, Orange and Blue, and Yellow and Violet.

We also talked about CMYK and RGB colour formats. CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow and Key) is the colour format used for print, whilst RGB (Red Green and Blue) is used for the Web.

Subtractive Colour

Additive Colour

Tints, shade and tone were also explained.

We were then asked to organise 10 chosen objects from the many we had in our yellow group, placing them into the tint shade and tone categories, with the colour we deemed as the purest yellow centrally.

After this, we were then asked to use the amazing pantone swatches to identify the codes of the coloured objects we had categorised, which was far more difficult than I thought it would be.