First Steps: Strategies for the safe use of colour in design

When I designed my first book cover I took some very nervous first steps in using colour. I knew the book was going to be printed and end up out in the world and I was very new to vector design and Adobe Illustrator. So while I wanted the cover to be bold enough to catch people's attention, I didn't want it to look silly and unprofessional.

I was also aware there were many pitfalls that were outside of my knowledge, not ever having had formal artistic training. And I was also aware that we often talk ourselves into believing something that we've drawn or created is a work of art when looking back weeks later it might appear the most embarrassing mess. And this embarrassing mess is exactly what people other than you and your loved ones see at first glance (if that's the case).

Knowledge and experience

A number of years on, and lots of trial and error later, I finally have some techniques. The first very safe approach to colour is to add and subtract black. This is a great way to start out and to avoid randomly throwing colours together. It's also a great way of not falling back on black and white for the purpose of text in a design.

While reversed out (or white text) can work well it can also be over done and if a title, subtitle and author name are all white on a book cover, for example, then we loose some of the opportunities for defining hierarchy through colour. But this is often better than complementary colours (as seen in final image here), which can be very tricky to work with because there is a risk that we end up with a design that is very Web 1.0.

Pure black meanwhile is in my mind and in the mind of others too strong in the majority of situations. Although I think I got away with it in the design of this book cover.

Analogous colours

Colour wheels and the the ways in which you are advised to choose colours from them doesn't avoid making bad combinations of colour. However, working around a colour wheel (taking advantage of analogous colours) does enable us to remain relatively safe in a way that parallels the addition and subtraction of black but which at the same time enables us to shift through a range of colours.

This helps us to be braver than we might otherwise be. And this becomes more important when we're going through phases such as the current one, inspired by the palette of the 1980s and fed by the fire of iOS 7 and 8 redesigns.

Light and dark

In fine art, composition dictates in very simplified terms that dark colours appear at the front and light at the back. The reason for this aside from nature itself – where the sun is rearmost and as objects are further away on a landscape they appear lighter – is that our eyes are drawn to the light and so pulled through the picture.

So always think about this and where you want the eye drawn to. Dark at the front, light at the back provides a very natural absorption of the entirety. Whereas following the opposite pattern is less clear. I find the foremost colour wanting my attention, which gets in the way of the exploring the whole.

For a more technical and historical view of the arrangement of light and dark in depth composition see Gérard de Lairesse. See also my discussion on the use of colour to create depth in fine art.

Conclusion

Design isn't all about staying safe. We need to experiment, but if we experiment by picking colours randomly, then it takes much longer to settle on pairings and we waste unnecessary hours. I find it less disheartening to either work in the ways described here, or to take a monochrome approach adding colour after a design is settled on.

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