Unlock the power of hues and shades in your everyday life. Discover how professionals harness color to influence mood, perception, and even behavior. Let's delve into four insightful strategies to master the art of color usage.
4 tips to design like a pro
Emotional component of color: feel at home or at home at the same time
- Communication: communicate with words and visuals
- Display creativity and establish brands: choose colors that appeal to you
- Create a distinct palettes to differentiate your work
Design with Accessibility in Mind
Approximately 300 million people worldwide are colorblind.
- Avoid using shades of red and green together and reinforce the colors with a text label or a free tool like Vischeck or Color Oracle to see how your design might look to someone who is colorblind
Understand How Color Meanings Differ with Culture
Remember that colors don’t have the same meanings in all cultures.
- So keep culture diversity in mind when using color psychology in your designs to invoke certain moods or messages
- For example, a white flag might communicate “truce” in Western cultures, while a silver flag would be more appropriate in Arab or African cultures.
Use Color for the Right Reason
When we were younger, we might have chosen colors simply because we liked them. Now as grownups using color, we need to think more carefully about why we use it.
- Use color selectively as a strategic tool to highlight the important parts of your visual.
Wrapping It Up
Design is a language all of us are learning to speak, albeit some more quickly than others. As we learn the power it has, we can better leverage how we use it to add to our messages and to make our presentation graphics more compelling.
- We can’t ever really outgrow the crayon box. We just have to remember to use color for the right reason and to limit the palette we use in any given visualization or slide deck.
- Be aware of how our design might look to someone who is colorblind.
Limit Your Palette
In order to communicate clearly, limit the number of colors you use in your design.
- Separate color usage according to the 60-30-10 rule: primary color should dominate 60% of the viz, 30% should be dedicated to the secondary color, and 10% allocated carefully to an accent color.
