Selecting Your Color Palette

COLOR TERMS Knowing basic color terminology will help you better understand which colors might work well together and what kind of effect different combinations will create within your design. • RGB Represented on computer screen; colors created by using small dots of red, green and blue • Spot Color A single color; often spot colors are used as one color on black and white pages. These colors can include metallic and fluorescents, and are usually a Pantone color (think of a specially mixed paint color). • Warm Colors Reds, oranges and yellows, which are vivid, energetic and appear to move toward the viewer • Cool Colors Greens, blues and purples, which give a feeling of calmness • Hue Synonymous with “color” or the name of a specific color • Saturation Intensity of a color • Value Lightness or darkness of a color • Tint A color/hue lightened with white • Tone A color/hue dulled with gray (adding gray to a color reduces saturation) • Shade A color/hue darkened with black COLOR WHEEL

The human eye can see millions of colors — but don’t worry, you only have to pick 3-7 to use in your book! Take a look at this simple color wheel to help understand colors’ relationships with each other.

When you mix the primary colors red, yellow and blue, you get the secondary colors on the color wheel: orange, green and violet. Mix the secondary colors with the primary colors, and you get the third level of the color wheel, the tertiary colors. Those include red-orange, yellow orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet and red-violet. Adding white, gray and black to these colors will give you an even larger palette of colors from which to choose.

Photo by Katherine Severin

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