Color Theory Basics for Graphic Designers - Creating Color Palettes | Lindsay Marsh | Skillshare
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Color Theory Basics for Graphic Designers - Creating Color Palettes

teacher avatar Lindsay Marsh, Over 500,000 Design Students & Counting!

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Class Preview

      1:04

    • 2.

      The Psychology of Color

      8:42

    • 3.

      Color Wheel and Harmony

      6:07

    • 4.

      Exploring Color Palettes

      6:35

    • 5.

      Exploring Color Palettes - part 2

      8:06

    • 6.

      Exploring Color Palettes - part 3

      6:19

    • 7.

      Student Project

      2:42

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About This Class

Color theory for Graphic designers: Create Strong Color Palettes.

Are you looking for a short dive into color theory?
This class will cover multiple aspects of color theory including the basics of color harmony and how to find color options within those color harmonies. We will also talk about the basics of hue, tones and shades and understand the differences between them.

We also look at wonderful color examples and the psychology of color. We look at the various effects different colors have on emotions, feelings and moods.

Lastly, we will go deeper into studying shades, tints and tones by learning how to make color selections in popular design software by using the HUE CUBE.

Lastly, we will practice create varieties of our base hue to create cohesive wonderful color palettes.

So, let’s learn together. 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Lindsay Marsh

Over 500,000 Design Students & Counting!

Teacher

I have had many self-made titles over the years: Brand Manager, Digital Architect, Interactive Designer, Graphic Designer, Web Developer and Social Media Expert, to name a few. My name is Lindsay Marsh and I have been creating brand experiences for my clients for over 12 years. I have worked on a wide variety of projects both digital and print. During those 12 years, I have been a full-time freelancer who made many mistakes along the way, but also realized that there is nothing in the world like being your own boss.

I have had the wonderful opportunity to be able to take classes at some of the top design schools in the world, Parsons at The New School, The Pratt Institute and NYU. I am currently transitioning to coaching and teaching.

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Transcripts

1. Class Preview: color theory for graphic designers create strong color palettes. Are you looking for a short dive into color theory? This class will cover multiple aspects of color theory, including the basics of color, harmony and how to find color options within those color harmonies. We'll also talk about the basics of hue, tones and shades and understand the differences between them. We'll also look at the wonderful color examples and the psychology of color. We look at the various effects different colors have on emotions, feelings and news. Lastly, we'll go deeper into studying shades, tints and tones by learning how to make color selections in popular design software. By using the Hue cube, we will then practice creating varieties of her base you to create cohesive, wonderful color palettes. So let's learn together. 2. The Psychology of Color : But I think psychology of color and design. There is power to color and design and their emotions. That air sparked when we view certain colors and colors can give you a sense of calmness. They can move or spark on motions of happiness and joy. Colors can remind us of something simple from childhood or make us feel hungry. How we pick and choose. The colors we use in design are greatly influenced by the type of emotions you want to bring about in your viewer. I created Stan Livable Resource called the Psychology of Color Chart. It list common emotions associated with colors, So taking a look at this chart your warm colors, reds, yellows and oranges are going to bring more energy and vibrance to your design, with reds being especially powerful. This is why warmer colors seem to be harder to use on large area designs. Because of this energy and draw it has especially reds. There could be a good reason to draw your eyes to a design to gain the attention among the crowds. Red is a great color to use to draw that attention and increase alertness. Red is commonly used on buttons and called actions toe. Pull your eye toward that area. Redd's can easily be overused. Used too much in a can drown a design in too much attention. Redd's tend to increase your appetite, so there's a good reason why fast food restaurants tend to favor red in their logos and adds Read should be used intentionally and with a purpose. Reds can also evoke a response of anger and fear a swell. So keep that in mind when considering using this attention grabbing color. As we move along the color wheel, we run into oranges. Oranges keep some of the enthusiasm and excitements of red, but also starts to combine the energy of yellow. Since they take a little bit of the edge off of red, you can find more ways to use orange and your designs, but also keep that same bright energy. Oranges work wonderfully with cooler colors like blue. They tend to be compliments on the color wheel, and it shows as you see orange being that bright highlight in the sea of cool colors. This balance works well in design because it provides a sense of contrast now, as we continue to move along the warm colors into yellows. The energy is undeniable with yellows, but it can also be one of its biggest weaknesses. Along with pinks, yellow is the least use color and design because it could easily be overused. But it could be a great compliment color alongside other colors where the Ellard other colors feed off the brightness of yellow. The only downside is yellow can be hard to see and read when printed, so I try to avoid using it with type, unless it's very intentional and very readable. Yellow does have a place in design, but wield it carefully and sparingly. This color can evoke happiness and give off a youthful vibe, and it might be why you commonly see it used in Children's products. Yellows can evoke anxieties as well, and it might be why you don't see a lot of yellow used in the health care industry. It's now time for green. We start to move toward the cooler colors, and there's a reason why green is the color of choice. For many cleaning industries, Green equals clean and fresh, but also reminds us of nature. It reminds us of fresh spring days when this bright green leaves start to bloom on the trees after a long, dark might winner. Green can also be used heavily by the financial industry to show positive gains on wealth and status. We see the stock market highlighted in green. We know it was a good positive day on the market, and there's no wonder why banks common lose green in their branding. Why not remind viewers of those positive increasing stock market days? There's no wonder that alongside Blue Green is one of the most commonly used color palette choices and design Scion as a unique color, not as commonly used to some other colors, like green and blue. But it combines greens organic, clean feeling with blues, calm feeling to create its own unique blend of the two. And you may commonly see biotech startups use science to show optimism. Blue is most commonly used color for brands worldwide, and there are many reasons why, because it evokes emotions like stability and calmness, and banks love to use the color blue for that reason, especially banks losing trust since the 2008 recession. You also see it used by industrials and those in the manufacturing industry, and you see it. Also in the health care industry, Blue is a great color to use for large areas of the design, like a background, for example, especially ones that have shades of blue. Blue can easily stand on its own, with less of a need to depend on other colors to tame it down. Blues chill nature makes it one of the most versatile colors on the color wheel. Next, we move into purple Purple mixes, a bit of stability and calmness of blue. With the compassion and vibrance of pink, it starts to take on a bit of warm tones, giving it a little to kick. Purple is commonly associated with royalty and sophistication. It's also commonly used in the hospitality industry for that very reason, they want you to feel like royalty. We also see used by the health care industry as well has a sense of love and passion that mixes with this ability and trust of blue. Purple is another color that can easily be used in larger areas of the design, yet add a little bit of that energy from the warmer tones. Purple is a rich, it's silky X is luscious, and when used right in a design, it can feel wonderful. Purples air Having a bitter renaissance in the design world with a huge resurgence of its use in youthful, vibrant brands. You see purple used as duo tones or Grady INTs and as overlays on photos giving photos a richer retro vibe, purple and vibrant yellows or compliments on the color wheel. And you can see that combination of energy happening every time you see these two colors together, purple can take up more space in your design more than the yellows, and your yellow should always just play. Ah, highlighting role. Being used a little less often toe highlight certain areas of the design. Pinks are a bit tough to use because of their strong past association with femininity, but don't count them out too soon. As that stereotype is slowly evolving and changing, pinks can remind us of romance and love. They can also remind us of a simpler time when no one was afraid of wearing pink like my favorite decade, the eighties pinks air similar to yellows, and that they can be hard to use in large areas of the design. Lighter versions of pink tend to do better with this than those hot, bright pinks, which have the same problem, is yellow because they're too strong. Pinks work best in tandem with calm encounter colors. Take, for instance, this example where the pink draws your eye, but the CAA cooler color calms it down just enough to take it all in, and now we come full circle back to reds. Feel free to download. This resource is a guide when thinking about how the emotions of color affect your color. Picking decisions when doing logos and creating brand color palettes. This should come in handy outside of typography. Color can move mountains when it used right and designed. It could change your design from dull to inspiring. With a few clicks of a button, use colors wisely and carefully and with intention as designers, it takes time to find the right color combos, and the best way to practice this is by creating your own color combos. Try creating a series of your own color combinations. Try just combining two simple colors, then try three and then work your way up to four. Think about how the colors you put together and make you feel Remember that contrast and color can work well with a cooler color and a warmer color together. But also analogous, or colors that are similar in you can create a common harmonious effect. What emotions do you want to evoke with your design? How does changing a color and your design change how you feel about the design? 3. Color Wheel and Harmony: This is the color wheel, and you may already be familiar with it from seeing it before. But we're going to work through all the terms, phrases and different ways to God arise. Color and graphic design So you know the difference between Hughes tones, tents and shades. There is a downloadable cheat sheet that lists all the terms we use in this lesson, so you could study it and more detail later on. First of all, color can either be warm or cool, depending on where it falls on the color wheel, with warmer colors being your orange yellows and reds and cooler colors being your greens, blues and purples. The three primary colors are red, yellow and blue, and you can use these three colors to create what are called secondary colors, which your orange, purple and green, for instance, mixing red and blue together make up purple and yellow and blue together. Make green, so the term color this term is used to describe any color we see whether it's a hue, shade, tone, her tent. So what is a hue? This is a general color family are color belongs to, and you'll notice the absence of grays, blacks and whites. This only includes color. He was coming a few main categories. Yellow, orange, red, violet, blue and green. If you're looking at a maroon color, for example, you would say it has a red hue, and this color, for instance, has both a yellow and a green hue. You may have heard the term tent along with the term shade. A tent is the presence of a hue in this example, a green hue with Onley white added to it. The more tent or white you add to the Hugh Greene, the lighter it becomes, and shade is just the opposite. With the addition of just black to a single huge, in this case were increasing the shade of purple to get a richer, darker looking purple color. A large amount of shade or black added to a color could make it look almost black, but could still maintain its base. You like, in this example of this rich, blacking looking color with a little hint of the hue blue. And lastly, not to overwhelm me with new terms. But there's something called a tone as well. A tone is the same thing as a tent are shade, but it's with any hue, and the color gray added to it, as graphic designers color harmony as what we can really find useful for helping us find color combinations that work well for our designs. Now that we know what tense shades and tones and hues are, we could talk a little bit more in detail about how to create different color harmonies. Here are the main color harmonies. First off, there's analogous colors these air colors that are closest together on the color wheel, and since they're so close together on the wheel, they tend to have less contrast and be less dramatic and appearance, giving the color palette a nice, calm feeling. Take, for instance, this nice sunset color palette. They're all fairly close together on the wheel, spanning from red to orange. Complimentary is the next one, and you may have heard of this one before. These Hughes exist on the opposite side of the color wheel, and these colors have the highest amount of contrast to each other, making it tricky to use at times. The most commonly seen complementary color is green and red, most often associated with Christmas time and another one. It's purple and gold, a popular color combo for sports teams, and it demands one's attention. Split, complementary or some use the term compound harmony is the same as complementary colors, but with one huge splitting into two nearby colors instead. What this does is make one color less dramatic, giving you an easier color palette toe work with with a little bit less contrast than pure complementary colors. The next color harmony we're going to review is monochromatic. Monochromatic colors are a single Hugh on the color wheel but contain different shades intense of that same you tense and shades or the addition of white and black to a huer base color. In this case, we can see monochromatic color palette for a hue of the color blue and notice how some of the colors are darker with the addition of black and others at a wider, lighter color to the blue. Monochromatic colors work really well because of this, and they all contain just one. He were based color, and that means this is a very flexible color harmony as you don't have to worry about multiple color hues. Next up is the triad harmony, this harmony contains three colors that are evenly spaced around the color wheel. This is the most vibrant, strong color harmony of the bunch, and they could be tough to use of. All three colors compete with each other. I find this vibrant color option or color harmony more useful for designs that need a more youthful, energetic option like a Children's event. And not all three colors with this harmony have to be pure Hughes. You can add a little bit of shade, which is black, or tent, which is white, or tone, which is grey to one or two of these colors to tone it down and to make the colors a little less vibrant. The key to this color harmony is toe. Let one or two colors lead the way and make the third color less strong when choosing colors for a brand local or design. Finding out which color harmony works best is a great way to get started, and there's a great website called color dot adobe dot com, which has been featured throughout this lesson, and it's a free place to find. Try to find out what color harmony might be right for your next project. you can explore different color trends, and you also have the ability to upload a photo and find the perfect color palette by using that photo as an inspiration. 4. Exploring Color Palettes: I am in Adobe Illustrator, and I'm gonna demonstrate some ways you can practically create different color palettes. And so first, we need to go back and understand our tent and shade and also our tone. But how do we create that? Using the color options in design software. That's exactly what this lesson is going to be about. So we're starting off with this white, simple Swatch, and we're gonna go ahead and highlight it, and I'm gonna notice you have your color panel and it's gonna be all white. So we want to do is double click on our swatch double. Click it and you're gonna get this panel. What this is called is a hue cube. So we studied before the different Hughes and Hughes are solid colors. They don't have any white or grey or black in them. They're just pure colors. So what happens in the hue? Kube is in. The upper right is a peer, Hugh, so that's gonna be pure blue. When we go over to the left, it's gonna slowly add a little bit of tent so you can see how it's adding a little bit attend at which is white. So We're adding white to the hue to get different variations of the hue. So go all the way over here to get pure white or all the way over to get the pure hue. And somewhere in between to get kind of these lighter tense. So the same thing with shade shades gonna be down here. So here's appear, Hugh, we're gonna move our way. All the way down is gonna get darker and darker as we add more shade, which is black. So we're adding more black to this until we get to pure black all the way down to the bottom. And same thing goes for tones. So as we know, tone is a Hugh. But with Gray added, instead of black or white, we're gonna go diagonally down, and it's going to slowly add a little bit of gray. As we move down the hue cube away down here, it's gonna go all the way back to pure black who have white, black peer Hugh and all the way down here. So that's basically how this works. This is a very common way to pick colors and adobe software, but also affinity designer and a lot of other different designs. Software's You're gonna see very similar set ups with having to pick your color. So understanding how to kind of pick colors within this you cube is very important when you're putting together your color palettes and you'll know how to create a lot of different things. So we're gonna do a little bit of an example. Here were to create a monochromatic color scheme here. Color palette. So let's go ahead and pick a peer hue color for this example. So let's double click or Swatch and to get appear, Hugh, we're gonna go to the upper right? Of course you can do the slider and pick any Hugh. This is all pure Hughes and was in the upper right. We could pick any color we want to go with. So let's kind of go with a blue color. We can always go to color swatches and pick out a purple perfect um, seeing why yellow, red, green or science here as well. The word is going to stick to a blue color all the way to the upper right. This is gonna be a repeat pure Hugh that we're picking out. And so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna just duplicate this will slide to the left, and we're just gonna double click this and we're going to slowly move and add a little bit tent, which is white. There's gonna do that along the way, slowly moving this down the way and you could see a nice palette developing. And then we could do one war and we could do almost pure white, I believe a little bit of hue in there. And so right now we have this nice, monochromatic all derived from a single hue and just added a little bit attempt to it. Now we can go the other way, so we'll go ahead and drag this over. And now we're going to the opposite. We're gonna add a little bit of shade just going down to the bottom, right? Once you kind of understand how all this works will be able to pick colors pretty easily once you understand. You know, Hugh shade tents. Kind of how adding black and how adding white can really change the aspect of a color or hue in this case, all the way down to pretty dark color. Go ahead just on lining those right here. So we have a tent over here. We have shade over here. We have the pier Hugh, right here in the middle. It's kind of the basics of how this works. We're gonna do something a little different. We're gonna drag this down. So we're taking our peer hue, and we're gonna add a little gray to it this time. So adding a little bit of tone, adding a little gray all the way down. So you kind of see how this is working. So we have the gray added, we have the white added, we have the black added. You could see how it can develop quite an array of monochromatic colors from these three different aspects. So let's do one more thing with drag it up, and now we're to do something a little different. So now we're gonna go up are huge selection. We're gonna slowly change and shift the Hugh. We're gonna move this down just a little bit, maybe add a little green. So this is kind of a hue level or you selection. So now maybe all this makes sense all the sickness, Where do you go? Where do you select the color. So we change the hue color here and the tent and the shade. And then the tone added gray to it. So that's kind of how the basics of how this color hue or Hugh Cube works when you double click this you keep this is default on Adobe Illustrator. You could have it on a daily photo shop. You can have in on any design program. You're going to see this kind of hue Cuban. Now you know why and when to go in what direction and went to kind of use some of these tabs and everything. So once we get into practical projects to do a lot of practical project works with color, we're gonna be kind of going over this. But now you understand? You know what? Direction to go. It could be a little bit confusing at first to go. Okay, Well, now, how do I you know, add shade? How do I have a tent? What? What does that matter? So we're gonna take this and another we're gonna go in another step forward, and we're gonna be creating some basic color palettes on. We're gonna derive it all from one single Hugh selection 5. Exploring Color Palettes - part 2: And what we're gonna do is we're gonna go around here. Of course, you don't have to use this shape. I'm just using it so I can kind of shift this around and show you how they look. So I'm gonna drag this over and we're gonna double click on this and we're gonna add What we're doing is we're doing some color exploration, so we start off with a single hue. And this is when you do research about the type of project you have and, you know, go back to that lesson on the psychology of color. What's a great base? You So a base you is where your whole color palette will derive from. This will be kind of that main color that the brand logo or design piece will have, and everything will kind of center around this huge choice. So this is a huge choice. We can derive from mood boards from photo inspirations from doing looking at psychology of color. There's a lot of ways to derive this original hue that will be the basis of our color palette. Kind of that main color we go to in the design theme. So what? We're gonna do is we have this. We made a copy. We're gonna double click this and work into the work around this color. So we're gonna create different shades, tense tones and maybe some varieties of Hughes that are very close by on the color wheel to kind of see what we can do to explore and expand this base. You further to get some other different types of secondary colors for our design piece. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna add a little bit of a tent dragon. You don't have to do it in particular this shape or this is this kind of something that helps me visually the kind of honey comb shape. I'm just taken the original hue and just adding gray, white or black. This different varieties different levels. You can even go darker if you want to kind of get a really nice dark version of the same color. You can also go very light, and you don't have to be stuck just doing tents and shades, which you could do is you can add a little gray. You can have a little bit a tent a little bit of a little bit of tone. You can select anywhere along this entire Hugh Cube to get a variety of colors that you can drive from this one a little bit darker. So just kind of seeing all the wide variety of different blues all from that single huge is adding a little bit of those colors to it to kind of get a little bit of variety, a little bit of different shades that can all be part of color palette. And so let's talk about color palettes for a little bit. What is the key to strong color palettes? Color palettes usually have a variety of different colors, but they also have different types of shades intense in them from a single color. So if I were to have Pierre Hughes, let's say I picked five Pierre Hughes for a color palette. They're all very super vibrant and super strong. But in some cases where as a designer, I need to have a lighter background. I need to have a darker background. I need to have some kind of option. You don't have a lot of flexibility when you have five very strong, pure Hugh colors that are competing against each other. So it's nice toe have the base you, but also some varieties of shades. Intents of that hue. So that in case I needed a lighter color or a neutral color of that hue, I have it. So that's what we're gonna develop with this color palette we're gonna be doing now as we're going to develop a nice, soft color palette. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get this strong purple hue right here, appear at the top. This is appear purple hue. What I like to do is go ahead and bring it to the left. Unless it's add a little variation of it just like this and a little bit of a darker version. And what's nice about this? Let's go ahead and do even darker here like a really dark, almost black purple that still has a little hint of purple. And let's do the same thing. Let's get some neutral light color, just adding a little bit of white kind of now off white over here. What's great about this is I have kind of our base you. But I have all this variety here, and as a designer, we need to have a righty because there's gonna be so many situations where darker background or a lighter background will be important. And it's great to have a very flexible color palette. So let's say this is kind of our base que color. Let's go and create one that will pair well with the purple. And so this is where we talk a little bit about contrast. So right now this is a pretty bright, vivid color. And so one of the highest contrast things you could do with a paring color palettes are finding that second kind of color pat main color for a color palette. Let's say we go to the color wheel and I'm just gonna go over to color dot adobe dot com, which is a great website for finding Hughes and Colors. And I am going to grab Go ahead, double click price watch here. I'm gonna get this hex code down here, and I'm just gonna copy this and paste it over. You have to worry about the technical side. We're just focusing on theory. I'm putting that in here so I can show you what is the opposite of the color were Wheel of Purple so the opposite is going to be Let's go and get this pink color. I'm gonna go ahead and select that as our base color by selecting this little triangle. And now I can select over here and it won't move. That base color is stuck. So let's find one is the opposite of the color. It's gonna be yellow. And so that's gonna be the highest contrast that you can have between two colors is the opposite on the color wheel. What if we were to slide this over and just add a little hint of warmness to it? We're gonna get some really nice color combinations here, So you see kind of that purple and you see that orange go really well together. So this is a very vibrant, high contrast color combo. So I'm gonna bring that orange over here and let's see what we can do. I'm just pasting that hex cut color code there. Let's get rid of these. Let's do the same thing we did before by creating a couple different variations by. So now this is our to base use, and these air just different variations of shades that we can use for a color palette. This is a very high, high, high contrast, vibrant color pairing, and we can keep going with another high contrast, vibrant color. And so this is great for a very youthful brand or logo or design piece, something that really needs a lot of energy that needs. If you look at the psychology of color, something that's, uh, refreshing younger demographic, I can even see this in the health care industry to try to break the mold of being kind of, you know, medical just kind of a warmth to it, because both of these are considered to be warm colors. Um, all of the purple is kind of in the middle of cool and warm, kind of in the transition period. This is great for something like that, and we could do the same thing but use less contrast and have kind of more of a subtle color palette pairing. So what we can do now is we can kind of combine some of these colors to create a color palette, so we kind of have our base. Hughes. We have our two main colors, but then we could start to pull from a couple of these different colors to really create a cohesive set so it could kind of pull these together picking colors we think will need. We're not gonna meet all these different shades intense. And so, as you can see, we're starting to develop a little bit of a palette here that we can use just kind of putting him in order. So this is kind of the final color palette. We didn't need to use all of those. We could see how we picked that base you, and that gave us a good idea of how to pick the next color based on if we wanted to be vibrant, youthful or a little bit more low energy, elegant, softer or subtle. So here's kind of that color palette in action. You can kind of see how it works really well, so let's do something a little bit different. Let's do a more subtle color palette 6. Exploring Color Palettes - part 3: and let's try to find a hue. Let's try to go for kind of a gold. Hugh, we're gonna move down here is gonna be somewhere between orange and yellow as gold is somewhere between orange and yellow, and we're gonna add a little bit of darkness to it. But a little bit of graves kind of how you find gold's or write about here. So you notice it's got a little gray. Little, little white, little black. So it's got a little tone tent shade all in there, so it's kind of got this richness to it. It's got If you look at the sea and why K here, you could see it's got a little bit of everything. It's kind of got a nice equal. So that's how you kind of get those more neutral colors is there's not one color that's dominant over the other. They kind of all have a little bit of the different inks. It was going click. OK, that's a nice gold color that we picked right away. Let's build everything off of this. So what? We can dio Let's do what we did before at a little lightness. This adding different Ah it's doing off white. This could go a little darker. So let's get our base, you and let's go a little darker. So what we want to do is we find want to find a really good pairing color. So what about we have a warm color already? What have we paired it with? A cooler color? What if we kind of got a blue? But let's do the same thing we did with the gold and add a little bit of gray. A little bit of why. So we're kind of staying in the center here, just like we did before. So both colors will have a similar profile where they have a little gray, white and black. Let's click on OK, so we have this nice kind of royal purple color, and we can do different various shades of this intense and like before. We don't have to use all of these in our main color palette. It's great to have secondary colors and options and off whites that we can use. You could see how we can start to build a really nice color palette. So let's say we want to kind of stay softer, maybe eliminate these last two. Maybe we make that a little softer, but still darker. There we go. So now we kind of have this nice, softer color palette. And what's great about Adobe Illustrator and you'll learn a lot about this when we focus on software is I'm gonna select this whole bottom row and let's say I'm not very happy with purple and gold. Let's say I want to do gray. I go up to edit edit colors and I'm just gonna convert to grayscale. And then now we have kind of a great skill with the gold, or you can go select. All of these object are edit edit colors, and we're gonna go to adjust color balance and click on preview. And you can kind of try out some different colors just to kind of see what could go really well. And as I'm adding a little green to the blue just a little bit, not much. I'm getting this wonderful blue softness here and don't really like that color, but that's OK, cause we could drag this one over and take that color and add a little white to it. There we go, so that could be another really wonderful soft kind of elegant. Ah, high end color palette so different from that super high contrast, bright, vivid color palette. And you can repeat this over and over. So we have kind of these two base use. We can continue and do a couple other ones as well and find out. Okay, we have gold. We have this blue weaken double click here and find out what would go really well with here . I mean, obviously, Pink would probably not be a good pairing with that, but we have kind of some warm tone, soft tones and kind of this blue. It would be nice to get something really neutral in there, so maybe we can kind of try and it could be as neutral as gray. Right? So we can have gray with this color palette, and we can have different shades and tones of grey. If you ever want to do gray scale, it's all gonna be on this left side. This is all gray cells of white to black. So you have these two strong colors and then to do something neutral with it makes a little more sense because when you start to get three really strong colors competing. It's it starts to be difficult. Um, so that's why I made this neutral instead of purple or yellow or green. None of those were gonna really pair really well because you have such strong colors here. So there we go. There's kind of a more subtle color palette. So hopefully this exercise helps. You kind of get into understanding. How do you actually select the colors? How do I start the basis of building a color palette? But understanding how to go lighter and darker and different contrast is a big key until learning how to build color palettes. And I wanted to demonstrate how this works and Photoshopped. So I have the color panel open and a girl learn all about this a little bit later when you get into the technical side of the software. Um, but this is kind of how instead of the Hue cube, you have lots of different options and photo shop of how to display the color wheel. So here's the hue Cube. This is what we did an adobe illustrator. So this will look very for Miller to you. We just did all this, but you can also go down to the classic color wheel and that they just recently revamped. This adobe has changed this in the last couple of years, and now you have this triangle. So same thing with the Hue Cube were adding white tent shade, black peer hue to the right, and then it can change your Hubei going around the color wheel. So it's just a really nice handy color picker picker. You also see this, an affinity designer and affinity photo. They have a very similar triangle. Color wheel selection course. There's grayscale, slighter, weaken, pick a color and do the grayscale. There's a lot of different options here explore, but I mostly used the Hue, cube and the color wheel. There's going to be the to that we're going to use the most in graphic design and in design projects, but I wanted to show you that as an option, you can always change that in Adobe Photoshopped or affinity designer or affinity Photo 7. Student Project : I want you to do the same exercise we did at the end of this lesson. And I want you to create your own, uh, soft color palette. I want it to be a soft color palettes or something similar to what we have here. I wanted to be for a high end, elegant, um, fashion brand, but I want it to be very soft colors. So go ahead and have fun creating create that base. You create some shades intents of that and then create a second Hugh that you think would pair very well and make sure you go over to color dot adobe. If you want to be able to find maybe something on the color wheel that will match that first, you when you're starting to create your second Hugh S O, that will be a very helpful website to helping you kind of explore the color wheel. And as you know, with color dot adobe, you can check out the different color harmonies like triads, complementary and, of course, the trustee monochromatic color scheme. Ah, so you can go ahead and explore that to help you with your project. So your project is to create a very subtle color palette. Very low contrast something for a high end, elegant fashion brand and something similar to kind of this style. You don't have to replicate those colors, but I want you to kind of go softer and as a bonus, if you want to keep going with this, I want you to create a vibrant, super vibrant color palette for a Children's clothing store. So we wanted to be lots of bright hues in different variations of those hues to create a really nice, cohesive color palette. So have fun with those two different projects, and I looked forward to seeing your colors. Of course, you can always find inspiration by putting together mood boards as well. You couldn't even find certain colors from those photos. That's a whole nother option that we're going to talk about a little bit later. Um, as we explore projects and do branding type of work where we create brand boards, mood boards to also help with color. Inspiration, as you see in color, is complicated. There's a psychology of color. There's a technical side of color with Hughes 10th shades, values and tones and all sorts of stuff and There's also the inspiration of colors through photography and inspirational videos, and then just deriving color from life and all of that for branding so you could see that color is not straightforward. There's a lot of different ways that you could derive color palettes, and I'm glad to be able to present you several of those class.