Selecting Your Color Palette

START WITH A PLAN Before you begin selecting colors, check to see how the school community feels about the use of your school colors and the mascot. Every school is different, but some have stronger feelings about the use of school colors. If you must use school colors, a large part of your palette has already been selected for you. School colors tend to make the book more marketable to students and parents. If you don’t have to use school colors, they can still be considered when creating your palette. The theme message and mood you want to evoke should be the main considerations when choosing your colors. If you choose or must include one (or all) of the school colors as a part of your palette, know that you will automatically have a color in the palette that works well with school photos on your spreads, especially sports pages. In instances where the best photos for the page do not ensure a compatible color choice, you can always use a neutral color from your palette rather than a clashing color from the dominant photo. DOMINANT AND ACCENT COLORS Applying color to a design project has a lot to do with balance. The more colors you use, the more complicated it is to achieve balance, so try to select anywhere from three to seven colors. When selecting these colors, make sure you break the palette into a dominant color and accent colors. A dominant color is dominant either because of how much it appears in the design, or because of how it stands out in comparison with other colors in your palette. The theme and the overall feel of the book should always be considered when choosing your combination. Look at the whole picture when considering colors for your palette, not just the individual colors. You may not like a single color, but it may work really well within a set of colors. For example, a popular trend is to select a palette that has a set of bold colors that can be used to represent each section of your book. All these colors can be introduced on the cover, repeated on the endsheets and then used for each division section of the book.

Photo by Ashlin Regulinski

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