Color Theory

Color theory is the study of how colors work together and how they affect our emotions and perceptions. It's like a toolbox for artists, designers, and creators to help them choose the right colors for their projects. Color theory enables you to pick colors that go well together and convey the right mood or message in your work.

Color is in the Beholders’ Eyes

“Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.”

— Paul Gauguin, Famous post-Impressionist painter

Sir Isaac Newton established color theory when he invented the color wheel in 1666. Newton understood colors as human perceptions—not absolute qualities—of wavelengths of light. By systematically categorizing colors, he defined three groups:

1. Primary (red, blue, yellow).

2. Secondary (mixes of primary colors).

3. Tertiary (or intermediate—mixes of primary and secondary colors).

What Are Hue, Value and Saturation?

Hue is the attribute of color that distinguishes it as red, blue, green or any other specific color on the color wheel.

Value represents a color's relative lightness or darkness or grayscale and it’s crucial for creating contrast and depth in visual art.

Saturation, also known as chroma or intensity, refers to the purity and vividness of a color, ranging from fully saturated (vibrant) to desaturated (grayed).

In user experience (UX) design, you need a firm grasp of color theory to craft harmonious, meaningful designs for your users.

Use a Color Scheme and Color Temperature for Design Harmony

In screen design, designers use the additive color model, where red, green and blue are the primary colors. Just as you need to place images and other elements in visual design strategically, your color choices should optimize your users’ experience in attractive interfaces with high usability. When starting your design process, you can consider using any of these main color schemes:

• Monochromatic: Take one hue and create other elements from different shades and tints of it.

• Analogous: Use three colors located beside one another on the color wheel (e.g., orange, yellow-orange and yellow to show sunlight). A variant is to mix white with these to form a “high-key” analogous color scheme (e.g., flames).

• Complementary: Use “opposite color” pairs—e.g., blue/yellow—to maximize contrast.

• Split-Complementary (or Compound Harmony): Add colors from either side of your complementary color pair to soften the contrast.

• Triadic: Take three equally distant colors on the color wheel (i.e., 120° apart: e.g., red/blue/yellow). These colors may not be vibrant, but the scheme can be as it maintains harmony and high contrast. It’s easier to make visually appealing designs with this scheme than with a complementary scheme.

• Tetradic: Take four colors that are two sets of complementary pairs (e.g., orange/yellow/blue/violet) and choose one dominant color. This allows rich, interesting designs. However, watch the balance between warm and cool colors.

• Square: A variant of tetradic; you find four colors evenly spaced on the color wheel (i.e., 90° apart). Unlike tetradic, square schemes can work well if you use all four colors evenly.

Your colors must reflect your design’s goal and the brand’s personality. You should also apply color theory to optimize a positive psychological impact on users. So, you should carefully determine how the color temperature (i.e., your use of warm, neutral and cool colors) reflects your message.

For example, you can make a neutral color such as grey warm or cool depending on factors such as your organization’s character and the industry.

Use Color Theory to Match What Your Users Want to See

The right contrast is vital to catching users’ attention in the first place. The vibrancy you choose for your design is likewise crucial to provoking desired emotional responses from users. How they react to color choices depends on factors such as gender, experience, age and culture. In all cases, you should design for accessibility—e.g., regarding red-green color blindness. You can fine-tune color choices through UX research to resonate best with specific users. Your users will encounter your design with their expectations of what a design in a certain industry should look like. That’s why you must also design to meet your market’s expectations geographically. For example, blue, an industry standard for banking in the West, has positive associations in other cultures.

However, some colors can evoke contradictory feelings from certain nationalities (e.g., red: good fortune in China, mourning in South Africa, danger/sexiness in the USA). Overall, you should use usability testing to confirm your color choices.

Learn More about Color Theory

Take our course Visual Design: The Ultimate Guide.

Register for the How To Use Color Theory To Enhance Your Designs Master Class webinar with color experts Arielle Eckstut and Joann Eckstut.

See designer and author Cameron Chapman’s in-depth piece for insights, tips and examples of color theory at work.

For more on concepts associated with color theory and color scheme examples, read Tubik Studio’s guide.