Graphic Design Theory - Color & Contrast

1. Introduction: You find it hard to decide on what colors to use in your compositions, to know which combination or harmony would work best, which color should be dominant, or how to achieve contrast in your chosen palette. Color and contrast are both essential for making sense of objects surrounding us and our environment. Color is probably the most important visual element of any graphic design project. As it triggers automatic emotions and would be for most people even understand what they're looking at. Similarly, contrast is another crucial element that attracts the eye, separate details from one another and adds visual interest to a composition. In this course, you will learn how to utilize these two significant components of graphic design. We will cover color theory, color harmonies, meanings of colors, and analyze lots of creating work to understand and appreciate various forms of contrast. By the end of this course, you will be more confident in choosing color palettes for your projects. Making important details stand out in your compositions. Makes sure to watch the next video in case this is the first course you are taking from the graphic design theory series. I will give you some useful tips on how to make the most of this course. 2. Terms and Definitions: You've probably heard of hue, saturation and value or brightness. These are quite basic things that you most likely know already if you are using any of the Adobe applications, most applications would show it as a vertical bar, but it can also be represented with a 360 degrees color veal. And that is why normally when we refer to here, it would be 360 numbers, which represents the 360 degrees of full circle. Saturation is a term that you've probably heard of. And this is an important one, but probably not as important as chroma. Chroma is the term that we normally use to define the purity of a color. The highest chroma value you can get when you have a color without mixed with anything else. So for example, read a complete red would be the highest chroma you can get. And then once you start introducing different shapes to it, like white, you will end up having different tints of red. Or if you mix black, you would end up having different shades of red. And finally, if you add gray, any type of gray, you will end up having different tones of red. And when we talk about saturation is slightly different because it's more of a comparative measure where you would compare the intensity of a color to the most vibrant or highest intensity color, which we will normally set as a 100 per cent. So if you imagine the color picker in Photoshop as a coordinate system, saturation would be the x-axis and the y-axis would be brightness or value, which defines how bright or dark a color is. Now so far it sounds fairly simple, but it gets complicated because hue can actually affect and impact the value of a color. And there is a perfect example here. So you can see the colors on top and then below it, you can see that values. So even if you pick only pure colors with that highest chroma, you will still have differences in their value. Yellow, for example, is a very bright, high-value color compared to this, darker blue is very low in terms of value. So try not to confuse value with tin, shade and tone because even without mixing white, black, or gray into the pure colors, you would still have differences between the values. And that is why it is so important when you are choosing a color theme, which colors you pick, because you can end up having a low key or dark composition if you pick darker colors or a vivid and bright composition, if you pick brighter or higher value colors, soon, I'm going to show you plenty of illustrations and examples which will help you to make more sense of these terms. But first, I would like to bore you with just a little bit more science because I feel like this is also very important when we talk about colors. Now, the probably the easiest diagram here that you can understand is that color wheel that we mentioned earlier. In this particular one, you can see the primary colors highlighted. So these are the ones that pop out the most from this circle. Then we have the secondary colors, which are always and mixture of the two neighboring primary colors. Orange, for example, is made up of yellow and red. Or green is made up of yellow and blue. And finally, purple is made up of blue. And read, once you start mixing secondary colors with primary colors, you would get tertiary colors. And those are the ones on this circle closest to the center point. Now as a designer or illustrator, the color wheel is also important for you to be able to find color harmonies, but most importantly, to find complimentary colors. These are great color pairs and they worked really well together. So the way you can find them is very simple. Where you have, let's say yellow. You just go to the opposite side of the color wheel and you will find the complimentary color, which is purple or at the same thing for blue, the complimentary color will be orange and for red is going to be green. This is already a color harmony, but we will learn much more about this and all the other different types of harmonies between colors. Now besides the color wheel, we can also categorize colors based on temperature, and that's what you can see here at the bottom. So it's measured in Kelvin and the lowest values or the warmer stones, while higher Kelvin values would be the cooler tones. In the middle we have white, which is 5500 Kelvin, and sunlight is actually a little bit lower than that, is 4900 Kelvin. Now this way of categorizing colors is more important for film and photography. But still as a designer or illustrator, It's good to know that is just another way of categorizing them. And I could get much more scientific than this if we started talking about wavelength. But once again, when you compare the color, temperature and the wavelength, you probably can already see the similarities. But let's move on and talk a little bit about color spaces. As a designer, this is definitely very important for, UM, most likely you are already familiar with the differences between CMYK and RGB. So these are two color spaces used for different medium. My RGB is mainly used with devices that needs light to represent colors like a projector, camera and monitor, CMYK would be used for print. And this diagram here shows it really well that the visible spectrum of colors is actually larger than RGB and CMYK. And RGB is also larger than what we can represent with CMYK or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. It might be also useful to remember that CMYK is called the subtractive color method, where you are starting with white. So that's just simply the color of the paper. Then you are subtracting from it until you are getting to black, which is the most intense color when it comes to print. On the contrary, RGB is an additive color method where you end up having white when you combine or mix all the colors together, generally what you need to remember is that the colors that you see on your screen are not going to be as vivid and vibrant once they're printed. So this is what would normally happen once you print an image out. It gets a bit, the saturated and the colors gets slightly washed out. This is again because of the difference in the spectrum. Once again, all of these vibrant colors in these corners here and also here and there they are the ones that CMYK cannot represent. And again, this is a huge topic we could talk about ICC, color profiles, color management, and spot colors. But I am not going to go into too much detail. Once again, I will cover these in the course that I mentioned earlier in the beginning. But moving on, I wanted to show you something extremely important. This is something that took me years to figure out and understand the importance of this is key and contrast. These are two terms that normally you would hear separately. But once you start thinking of the two together as a pair, that's when it starts to make sense and that's when it will help you creating really striking compositions, whether it's photography, illustration, or graphic design. So both of these terms, c0 and contrast, has something to do with the value. And you can see here on the top that the top third of that coordinate system would represent the high key values of colors than we have mid key or meat tones in the center, and then low key or darker values at the bottom. And contrast, again, you probably are already familiar with means that you have colors next to each other that are clearly different from each other. The higher the contrast usually the more striking that differences. And here is a very interesting chart which shows the combination of key and contrast just simply by using grayscale values. But of course, this would also apply to color images and to make this easier to understand and to visualize it better. Here are a couple of portraits showing exactly the same pairing of these two terms. So on the top left we have the high key, low contrast, followed by Heikki mid contrast, and finally Heikki, high contrast image. So they are all very bright, so the value is high, but we are increasing the contrast. And mainly in this case, the lips are the standout feature on the right side, it almost feels like it wants to jump off the screen. And that is how contrasts can be used as a focal point in the composition. Further down we have the medium key row, again from left to right, increasing the contrast. And finally in the last row, we have all the low key portraits. And similarly here we have loci, low contrast on the left. And then we reach good old John, vague on the right with low key, high-contrast. Now, these type of images are usually the most striking ones because you have a lot of black and then you have some powerful bursts of vite in certain places. And of course, the highest contrast you can achieve in a composition is pure black, next to pure white. 3. Meanings of Colors: Alright, so now that we've covered the basics of fundamentals of colors, Let's talk about the meaning of color. And this is more color psychology. And this is where we start to see some interesting examples. So first, here is red. Now, if you want to learn more about the meaning of RAB, I actually have a separate video on that, which you can again find in the description below. And in a nutshell, red is great for grabbing attention. It's a very striking color, especially when it's combined with black and white. And it can carry a lot of meanings from power, aggression and strength to last fertility. And in some places the world also prosperity in general, when you use red in your composition, it can help to make decisions quickly. It's almost like a call to action. Moving on, we have blue, which is the color of the sky and see, so naturally it would have a calming effect, but it can also represent trust, pureness, tranquility, and stability. It is actually the most used color on the Internet and amongst corporations, especially for brands that are related or associated with safety and cleanliness. And interesting fact about blue is that it actually slows our metabolism down. So that is again why we consider it a calming color. Moving on, we have green, which is associated with nature, growth and balance. It symbolizes harmony, serenity, and it can also be used for safety, just like blue. Just think about the Green Man in the traffic lights. It is a color definitely often used by medical and eco-brands. Moving on, we have yellow, which is the color of sunshine, and it usually represents joy, happiness, and energy. Now remember when we talked about value amongst all the different use, and yellow is one of the highest value color. So there is definitely a connection there. Why we would normally associated with energy generally, when we look at yellow color, it evokes pleasant and friendly feelings and it's often used in the entertainment industry and for toys. However, that can also mean that sometimes it can feel a little bit childish. Of course, it didn't feel childish in Kill Bill, but you just have to be aware of that aspect of this color. Next, let's take a look at purple. Now, this is usually associated with royalty, luxury, nobility, and ambition. So it is ideal for luxury brands and high-end goods and services. It's worth remembering that purple is the least light color by men, but it is actually in the top three favorite color for women. And last but not least, let's take a look at orange. Now, this is the color of communication and optimism. It combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. And it usually can give the sensation of heat and can be associated with summer. Now I want it to show intentionally that it can represent so many different feelings and emotions from the very daunting and depressing Apocalypse Now to films like Lion King and even fun places like summer camps. To summarize, the meanings of colors are not like an exact science compared to the previous things that we've talked about. It's more personal and colors can have different effects on different people and culture difference again, can really impact the perception of color. 4. Color Harmonies: Now I mentioned earlier color harmonies and this is the next section which I would like to focus on, starting with the most easiest one to understand complimentary colors. Now these are the two colors on the opposite sides of the color wheel. When using this color harmony in your composition, you can achieve a very striking result and you will have the highest contrast between the colors. And there is a reason why Hulk is wearing purple pens, which really helps to further emphasize the intensity of the character. Just to highlight two more things here. I love the way how we have split between the warmer tones and the cooler tones at the bottom in this composition. Again, it's a perfect example of complimentary harmony or the art poster for the movie Parasite, where we have the cooler tones on the top and the warmer tones at the bottom divided by the stairs, which is obviously a very important part of the movie. And this contrast in the colors also represents the social differences between the two families. If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommended because there's a lot of really cool compositions and editing in the film. Now moving on, we have our next Harmony called split complimentary, which is similar to complimentary with the difference that here we have a base color. Then on the opposite side of the color wheel, we actually have two adjacent colors used within the palette. This palette is still energetic, even if it's not as striking as the complimentary harmony. But we can see a couple of really nice examples here, showing that it can be a really fun palette to work with. Moving on, we have Triad, which can be a little bit more trickier than the previous two. Here, again, the best practice is to choose a base color and then the other two should be more like a supplementary color. So you shouldn't use the three colors equally instead, have a good balance between them. One of my favorite color harmonies has to be analagous colors, which are perfect for setting a certain atmosphere. Again, relying on the meanings of colors that we described earlier in this palette, you would pick colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel. And in this case, to create contrast, you would mainly rely on value, tones and shades. Last but not least, we have Tetra, the color palette, where we have four colors on a rectangle within the color wheel. Essentially, these four colors can be divided into two complimentary pairs. This is again, a little bit more complex and not as easy to pull as the other ones that we've seen so far. However, venues cleverly and with a good balance between the selective colors, it can, again result in great compositions and you can actually even have color harmonies V doubt pairing different hues with each other. So you could end up having a monochromatic color palette when you are using a single hue and you are just combining different shades, tones, and tints. And we can see how nicely this could work in these illustrations here. And then we talk about achromatic colors. That's when you purely rely on different shades of gray. Now again, I intentionally wanted to show you that when you work with black and white or gray values from the very menacing looking skull on the left, you can actually end up having these cuddly cute illustrations as well. So a color palette should never be a restriction of what your work is going to look like. It's more about emphasizing a certain mood or atmosphere. And once you learn how to work with them, is going to really show and help to make your work look more professional. Since we are talking about harmonies, I wanted to also mention the 603010 rule, which is mainly used in interior design. However, it can also be applied to graphic design and illustration. And it is known to be a great way to balance out the proportions between your selected colors. And normally the way you would work with this is that you would pick your base color, which is going to make up roughly 60% of the composition. These colors should usually be a high chroma value or pure color, followed by as supplementary color, which is the 30 per cent within the composition. And finally, the ten per cent would be your accent color, which would really stand out and normally would be a complimentary color to your base color. And here are two examples when it's applied in interior design. But as I said, it can be applied to all kinds of things from packaging, design, branding, and to be honest for everything visual. 5. Perception of Color: Now we've talked a lot about the perception of color already, but I wanted to make sure you understand that it's not just the meanings that we associate two colors that are important, but also the demographic of your target audience. Colors can be perceived differently by genders and also the different age groups, not to mention people from different parts of the world. Good examples are red and white, which have completely different meanings in the western and eastern part of the world. And last but not least, let's talk a little bit about colorblindness, which is again, very important for you as a graphic designer to understand because this can really impact and affect the way you work. Colorblindness is decreased ability to see colors or the difference between colors. And it is much more common amongst men than women. And again, this is a much more complex topic and I don't want to standardize or generalize, but usually females are much better at differentiating colors than men. Once again, this has a lot to do with genetics. Now you can see here the three main colorblindness types and their statistics amongst the population. And whenever you create designs, these are the ones that you need to keep an eye out for and make sure that the compositions you create won't use colored pairs that are hard or impossible to see with these type of decreased vision abilities. A great free tool that you can download for both Mac and PC is called Color Oracle, which I already have running here in the background, and currently it's set to normal vision. But let me zoom out here in melanoma. And if I press a shortcut that I set up, I can quickly switch to simulating one of the colorblindness types. And if I wanted to, I could even switch to the other types like tweets and OPIA, once again, will look slightly different. So this again is just a way to simulate colorblindness and to help you to see where I'm going to need more contrast between colors, especially for typography. This is important because using color pairs next to each other that are hard to differentiate will affect legibility. In Photoshop, you actually have the two main types of colorblindness as a color proofing option, which you can find under the View menu Proof Setup. And there you will see colorblindness put an OPIA and they'll tenor OPIA. I hope I pronounced it correctly. And you can just use the command or control Y shortcut to switch between the selected color blindness. Again, this is just a simulation and switching back to seeing the colors normally. At the bottom, you can see I intentionally selected two colors that wouldn't work well together for that particular type of colorblindness. So the texts almost completely disappears by, if I switch to the other colorblindness, you will see that the texts on the top will disappear. Once again, switching back to normal and once again back to seeing it or simulating that colorblindness. There is also a really cool website where you can colorblind proof your website. You just have to put your URL in and choose which type of colorblindness you would like to simulate. And then you will be able to see them next to each other. So the original colors and how people with that colorblindness would see the colors. And I can see our site, the assignment designer.com. Probably this color should change because it's a little bit hard to see on the white background. And that is all I wanted to cover in this video. I hope you found it useful. If you haven't already subscribed, make sure you do so now in case you don't want to miss the upcoming episodes of this series. 6. Illustration: Let's jump straight into looking at a couple of amazing illustrations to learn about contrast. So first of all, why is contrast at design principle? Well, because it is a fundamental tool in visual communication, and no matter what you do as a creative, it's something you really have to understand and utilize in your work. I would say almost every time no matter what you do, whether it's photography, UX design, illustration, graphic design. It is something that you really need to understand and consciously use it in your work. Throughout this video, I'm going to pick a couple of examples and I'm trying to explain to you how contrasts being implemented because pretty much everything that you use in your designs. So all the elements that you place in your design can utilize contrast, whether it's scale, orientation, color, value, or pretty much anything that you can think of. Any attribute can have a contrasting effect when used deliberately, when it comes to illustrations in particular, contrast is usually used as a storytelling device. It's something that you can use to create tension, interest. So even on this first striking illustration, there is a clear use of contrast. And mainly it is about these soft round shapes and the sharp corners. And it's a nice rhythm that is created here. So we have always the round shape and then a sharp point, round shape and an, a sharp point and that goes throughout the whole design. Now of course, there's also contrasting the color or value. But more importantly, I would say it's about the shape contrast in this case, that is really making this illustration effective. Now this is a good example of seeing how contrast can be used for storytelling. So we have two very contrasting color, temperature in this image. We have the warm tones within the light coming from the book, and then we have all those cool tones around it in the environment. So in this case, the contrast establish not only helps us to focus on the most important detail in the illustration, but it also tells that story, that warmth or positive energy that is coming from reading the book creates this lovely and peaceful environment for this couple, or doing a different style, but very similar to this. We have someone working in the forest. And again, we have contrast established, in this case with a more monochrome color palette in the darker parts and a vibrant color palette in the part that is lit by the torch. And in this composition, the contrast is helping also to establish movement or direction. So we have a clear direction established here. And once again, the storytelling aspect is also important. We have animals and characters reacting to the light. And also we have these scary things here in the dark. So without any text or explanation, we clearly understand what's going on in this illustration and we can relate to it. Now another keyword that we have to talk about when it comes to contrast is juxtaposition. It means placing two different elements next to each other, or two things that are in contrast to each other. And it is used in advertisement and in all kinds of visual communication to catch the viewer's attention. So juxtaposition relies on contrast, and it's a good example of having two different things which are similar in shape, but obviously very different in real life, a banana and a shark combined together and creating that shock value that is again used to grab people's attention. Now when you look at this illustration, you can already start thinking about what properties are used to establish the contrast. And there's actually many of them. One obvious one, of course, is scale. So we have a huge character, which is not even in the frame, but we can see the scale from the shadow that is cast onto this small characters standing in the middle. But besides that, there's also other things that helps to create the contrast. And if we take a closer look, you can probably see it better that there's also a difference in texture. So via the background and the shadow is textured, the character in the middle is completely clean, so there's no texture on it at all. And yes, texture plays a very important part in establishing the contrast as well. Just think of a book cover where you have a nice embolus detail or something that has a foil. So immediately you have a texture. We'll difference between the embossed or full details compared to the rest of the cover. And even if that textural difference is not tactile, not something you can actually feel. When you look at an illustration like this, you already have that in the back of your head. You almost feel the difference between the two surfaces. Now of course, there is also contrasting value and color. The main character compared to the environment. And as a pro tip, you should always preserve the brightest and darkest details to the focal point of your composition. What I mean by that is in this case, obviously it helps to draw attention to the character because we have this bright color on the trousers and we have the darkest details, probably in the illustration next to each other. But here is another brilliant example of utilizing this extreme contrast and using it on the focal point, where obviously we have the detail here which is the darkest, which is this building against the bright white clouds in the background. Another illustration by the same artist love and the Sibyl, highly recommend you check out his work. When you go into Milano board, just click on the link and then just explore all the projects that he has on Behance. It's highly recommended because you can learn a lot about composition from just simply looking at his work. But again, as I just said, the most contrasting details are the focal points very clearly established in the composition. And another example by another artist, we again have a very clear focal point, again, established by putting those two extreme contrasting colors next to each other. Now contrast is also a great tool to establish distance or depth in your composition. And that is one thing that we call atmospheric perspective, which means that anything further away from us tends to lose its saturation or vibrance. And there is obviously air between you and the distance, and that starts to diminishes the color and further away something is, the more muted colors will look, and the more it's going to also mix with whatever color the sky is. This is used very commonly in paintings, in illustration, and we can also see it here very clearly. So we have these cooler tones in the foreground, contrasted by the warmer tones in the sky. And all the details that are going further away in distance are going to get more closer to the color of the sky. But again, as I said, the contrast is the main thing that is establishing that distance. Even though we are looking at a flat two-dimensional illustration, we still feel like there is a vast distance that we can travel towards when we're looking at this artwork. Now, even an illustration like this one which is perfectly symmetrical, can have a very interesting dynamic composition by having that contrast in the colors on the left and the right. This technique of contrasting with complimentary colors used to light scene is very common in photography as well, and we will look at a couple of examples later on. But when it comes to using a limited color palette, it is also important to use contrast as a tool to separate details or characters in this case. So there's probably four or five colors used in this illustration. But more importantly, you will never see two of the same colors close to each other. So let's take this character here in the middle of, for instance. So she has yellow sleeves and dark purple for the trouser. Her skin color is blue, directly next to or on the left and the right, we have characters with different skin colors. So they are more magenta. Their trousers are both cyan, so they are not going to clash with this other character in the middle. And the only overlapping detail that is the same color in this case is this little detail here. So we have our central character's skin tone that cyan, please next to or overlapped with this blue color of the trouser of this other character. So this would be considered a mistake if it was not intentional, but because this Illustrator is using the contrasting colors next to each other and creating a beautiful rhythm. In this line of characters, these small areas of blending between the characters is not causing any problem. If anything, it makes it more interesting and allows the viewer to work a little bit harder to understand what is going on. But in general, if you follow the colors from left to right, like scanning through the image, you will always see a beautiful pattern and rhythm created. So let's just follow the magenta color. First. We have it here on the skirt, then use more on the skin, then going down to the skirt, then again on the skin, then comes down here on the dog than we have it also on the skin, then down to the trouser than up here on the speaker. And the skin, also the bird than we have it again on these details in the middle and then the skin at the end. So you can see how beautifully this illustration really guides the viewer's eye through the whole composition. Now before moving on to talk a bit more about photography, Here's another brilliant example of contrast establish with many different aspects of this composition. First of all, we have a poetry and a very strong geometric shape behind it. So in this case, the geometric shape and the organic details, the face is already creating contrast. And then we have also the extreme contrast of black and white next to each other, which is physically the highest contrast you can achieve. And that is why black and white illustrations of typography can be so effective. But what's most intriguing is having the same color used on the facial hair or beard and mustache on this character as the color used on that shape in the background. And the only thing that really separates them is that thin black line here. So again, by thinking about the things that we've already covered, you might be saying that there is not enough contrast here. However, the lack of contrast can be just as effective as contrast. Remember I said, creating visual tension. So either by utilizing contrast or doing the opposite will also create that exact same tension. Learning how to utilize a design principle is the first step in understanding it, but then the next step, or later on when you get more confident in using it, is about learning how to push the limit until it still works, but it is just about working. This is a perfect example of both having, again, black and white colors next to each other, having organic and geometric shapes next to each other. But then also having that very low contrast separation between two important details, again directly next to each other. So again, there is tension created on many levels. These subtle and less obvious details or solutions are the ones that really making your work look professional. This is what we would normally say that you have to develop an eye for it to be able to create something like that. The best exercise to do is to always really pay close attention and analyze anything that you see that you like. And try to really identify what makes that work interesting, What makes it stand out, and how all of these principles are utilized or not utilized to create a specific effect. 7. Photography and Film: We already seen some amazing examples of illustrations where contrast is utilized, whether to establish the focal point or to help tell the story. Here are some examples of typography, and more importantly, a reminder of something we already covered in another video about color theory. In that video, I explain and go into detail on the difference between value and contrast and the relation between them. And these nine images here that you can see on my screen are perfect examples of the little diagram here on the left side. So you might have heard this term low key or high key and photography. And that's essentially is playing with brighter or darker tones. And again, although this is photography and photos that we're looking at, It's the same exact principle that you can utilize in your graphic design compositions. The most important lesson to learn here is that it's not always the highest contrast That's going to give you the best result. It really depends on what type of mood or atmosphere you are planning to set in your composition. So for instance, an image like this one with high contrast can be just as effective as an image with low contrast or an extreme example where almost everything blends together, but still we can see the important details. So think of contrast as a slider that you can adjust in your composition. You can pump it up and create something very dramatic when you use a lot of contrast or you can using it sparingly, maybe only utilize it in certain parts of your composition. Like here is an amazing example by Florida bushy, where she again obviously has a high key, high-contrast composition, but high contrast is only utilized on these important focal points of the composition. And another amazing example of juxtaposition of two things placed on top of each other and aligned in this particular way. That makes it look very interesting, if you like movies and other goods study to understand how to use contrast would be Sin City, where obviously it's been really amazingly used throughout the whole film. And actually both movies are perfect examples of it. Almost all the scenes are completely black and white and the highest contrast details are always used for storytelling purpose. So they had highlighting those unique details that are important for a specific character. But then there's also lots of scenes where you would have colors popping out from the black and white environment. Again, used to emphasize certain details and create focal points. The color pop effect, of course, is also used in photography to again separate certain details from the environment. And this, again is something that I would call a very obvious use of contrast. Maybe to a point that it is over-the-top or a cheesy, while you have more subtle contrast in compositions when it comes to photography. When, for instance, you have a single tree that seems like it is standing in the center of the shot. But actually that tree is the one that fell and all the other trees are standing. Since this is a bird's eye view, most likely taken with a drawn, but with that very interesting and subtle use of contrast, we have a very unique composition. I'm not saying that you should avoid using too much contrast in your compositions. It's again about finding the right balance for what you are trying to say. Because remember, you are communicating visually and it's finding that tone of voice that works best for the story that you're telling. 8. Graphic Design: So jumping straight into it, We have a very iconic image to begin with, graffiti by Banksy, which shows really well many aspects of the things that we already discussed in the first part of this tutorial. So we have an extreme contrast of black and white next to each other. But we also have a color pop on the flowers. So that contrast in saturation creates a clear focal point here. But we can also see a clear use of juxtaposition. When we have two contrasting things put together. We all know that a person like this wouldn't be throwing flowers around for something much more harmful. But having that shock value there is what makes these graffiti is so popular and so powerful. Now this is quite common for movie posters as well to use extreme contrast. And black, white and red combination is very popular in all kinds of designs because red is a great highlight or pop color. And black and white, as we already discussed, is the extreme contrast. So the most impactful pair that you can put together. But besides the contrast in color and value, there's also other things contrasting in this composition. One of them is the direction or angle, because we have a very clear line dividing the composition here in the middle. But that line is repeated with the shoulders of Russell Crowe on the top, and then also with the hat of Christian Bale's character at the bottom. So these three lines are almost parallel and they create a very strong diagonal movement within the poster. But contrasting that, we have another very strong angle which is going almost in the opposite direction. And that is created by the rifle that Christian Bale is holding. And besides that, we also have contrast in the typography. So the surnames and first names very different in terms of line weight. And that creates a very good contrast. And this is a very typical way of using contrast in typography to establish hierarchy and also to create similarity between elements. Now here we have a brilliant magazine cover, again, completely monochromatic, so we only have black and white. And in that sense, the vineyard logo on the top is already utilizing the extreme contrast of black and white. But I loved the way on this particular cover how the silhouette or the portray is overlapping or going into one particular part of the logo. It creates a nice interaction without making it hard to read. Now, besides the obvious contrast between the white and black space in the cover, which creates the silhouette itself. We also have a contrast between that flat block of color and the actual detailed photorealistic glasses, which creates a perfect focal point forward the composition, and also helps to recognize the person in the image. Now even in branding, you will have contrast besides again at the obvious value contrast of black and white, we again have a secondary contrast of the round shapes on the left side and the straight lines on the right side. And that can be an easy example to remember that usually on a good design under the surface, There's all these additional secondary, tertiary contrast establish. So there's always one that's obvious, but there's additional ones that you can find. If you start peeling of layers and really start understanding how something has been created and what was the intention. So always keep that in mind that whenever you create something besides the obvious contrast, you can always have some hidden, less recognize a blend more subtle uses of contrast as well. Here is a great poster which was created the 100th year anniversary of the Bauhaus style or movement. And this perfectly captures again many layers of contrast. So we have the contrasting geometric shapes overlaid on top of each other. We also have contrasting colors, but then we also have contrast in the edge, detail or clarity. So while every shape has a very clearly defined corner, the other side of the shape will be blended in and disappearing, creating a beautiful blend between these elements to establish balance between the left and the right side of this composition, we have the sharp visible corner of the shape on the top on the left side, while on the one at the bottom we have that sharp visible corner on the right. So that helps to roughly have equal amount of volume of color, both on the left and the right side. Or you can also divide the composition this way. And again, you will have roughly the same kind of balance. And by the way, you can't just purely rely on contrast to create a great composition. You always have to pair it and combine it with other principles like balance. In this case, we've seen examples of using it together with rhythm and pattern in the illustrations in the previous episode. Here is another great example of contrasts used in typography. So we have two different messages overlay on top of each other. And the reason why we can still read it is because they are clearly different. One is a condensed sans serif type, which only has the outlines. And the other one is more of a handwritten script type tax, which is obviously different in color as well, but also has a bit of a three-dimensional quality to it. So again, for this composition to work, it was necessary to establish multiple layers of contrast. Some more obvious, some a little bit more subtle. Now there is also a psychological effect of contrast. There is a reason why most web shops would have similar products laid out next to each other. So it allows you to compare them and to find which one is better, faster, larger, so on, so forth. Probably one of the most minimalistic and the same time most professional example of this would be Apple, where you would be able to again see the different models next to each other. And here again, besides the obvious difference in size, which we can clearly see when these two are put next to each other. We also have contrast in the wallpaper use, which clearly defines the pro version different from the other two. In UX and web design contrast is crucial because mainly they are used on the elements that you can interact with, whether they are dials like these, or buttons or any other navigational elements. But even within the contents, you would have contrast established on the tax to make sure that it is easy to find it. And at the same time to create hierarchy and similarity, we have the same color and font and even placement used throughout all of these icons or elements here in this screen. 9. Popular Culture: And finally, here's a few more examples. Again, just to look at different aspects of ways of using contrast. One artist I would really like to highlight who is in my opinion, a master of using contrast is Olly Moss. So check out his work. These posters are all from him here on the top. And his work, besides using contrast, is also very recognizable for the clever use of negative space, whether it is to create a smart pairing of the silhouette or profile of Clint Eastwood and the gun, in this case, or the pine tree that is created as a secondary read from the mountains and the boulders in the foreground. What I wanted to bring up this poster from Olly Moss again, because this has multiple ways of using contrast, we have these strong lines on the left and the right side, which also again creates tension and really helps to focus and direct the viewer's eye to the center and they're using contrast. We have the brightest and darkest details right next to each other, creating a focal point on the female character. The same high-contrast used on the title, which is also at the same time the teeth. But then we also have the contrast in scale with this huge, gigantic apes had and the small character in front of it. Since we are talking about King Kong. This is again, another example of an iconic design of the huge monster, the ape and the tiny little fragile female is like the ultimate contrast that you can put together in a frame and in a composition. That extreme juxtaposition of putting two completely different things next to each other creates a very powerful tension and a compelling story to tell. The same type of contrasting character pairs can be found also in TV shows like The Mandalorian. Again, completely different characters on a journey together creates a very powerful and engaging story. And just like before, it is not just their size, but also their behavior that's different. The things that they are different. In this case, the species is also different. And the interactions of these contrasting characters, what makes an interesting story maybe not as extreme, but the same contrast in character pair can be seen in Logan, also in the latest version of god of war game, or even Last of Us. And again, the fact that in this composition, besides having these two contrasting characters together, there is also the black and white extreme contrast in value that helps to amplify the tension and makes the whole composition more interesting to look at. And last but not least, another artist I wanted to highlight from whom you can learn a lot about using contrast in your composition. It's magnesia Lopez. He produced an incredible amount of posters, most of which you will be probably familiar if you are using Pinterest or be hands because his work is all around the Internet. And one of the main appeal of his work, besides being very creative, is the clever use of multi-layered contrast. And by now, after going through so many examples, I'm sure you can spot most of these V's of using contrast, for instance, in this composition or here is another one. Again, lots of clever ways of introducing contrast, whether it's sharp and round shapes next to each other, or bright vivid colors next to dark details, or the unexpected combination of two images, in this case, creating the focal point in the center of the composition. I really hope that these examples will help you to be able to utilize and use contrast in your own work. So to summarize, the most important thing when it comes to contrast is that you have to use it in every composition, but you need to learn to tone it up and down depending on what you would like to achieve, increase the contrast if you wanted to create a dramatic, impactful design and tone it down if you want to be a little bit more subtle, but also don't forget to establish multiple layers of contrast. So besides the obvious contrast, always have a few more nuanced ways of introducing it in your comps. And there is no point in listing what can be contrasting in InDesign because anything can be contrasting as we've seen it from these many examples that we covered, it is only up to your creativity and creative decisions of how you are utilizing it for your work. 10. Online contrast checker: When it comes to contrast, one of the most important thing as a graphic designer you have to consider is to make sure that there is enough contrast for the text because that is effecting legibility. This is a brilliant website for which the link you can find below this video and also on the melanoma boards where you can test color combinations, having a background color and the text color. And you will be able to get ratings and see how well that contrast is going to perform. So in this case, we have a very high score with this dark blue color used for the text and the bright blue color use for the background. But let's see what happens if I change the text color. I'm just going to go higher up here, and immediately the rating is going down, so we get a very poor rating. So this is definitely not going to be enough contrast for a small tax, but it won't even work for large text. These quotes here on the right are just for preview purposes, but you can always see this in full screen as well, just to see the result of the color combination. And I really like this option here, which can help you to fix the contrast. So once you click on this, you can select what you allow to change. In this case, I'm just going to say adjust both colors and immediately we add back to a high score. The good thing is that you can copy these hash codes once you've found the right combination. But you can also change the picker to other color modes. So instead of the hex code, you can also get RGB, CMYK, even lab codes. And if you decide to copy this, just click on this little icon here, which you will then be able to use in any Adobe applications. Now in case you are wondering how does this scoring works, you can find more explanation about it. It's actually according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which defines two levels of contrast. The WA is the minimum contrast level, and the AAA is the enhanced or ideal contrast. In the next video, I'm going to show you another very interesting tool from 3M. It's called the visual attention software. This is not a free application, but it's a great plug-in that you can use in Adobe applications. And you will see how artificial intelligence can be used to instantly predict what viewers will see at a first glance when they are looking at your designs. As you will see, both color and contrast in your compositions has a lot to do with what people will be paying attention to you. 11. Visual Attention Software: Here we are in Photoshop and as you can see, I already have the 3M visual attention software plug-in open on the left side. And if you're wondering how to install this plugin, probably the easiest if you go to the plugins menu and choose browser plugins. This is going to take you to the Creative Cloud app, where you can search for plugins and you just need to type in 3M here on the left side. This plugin is currently available for Photoshop, Illustrator and Adobe XD. But for now, let's just jump back into Photoshop and take a look how we can improve the design of this chocolate packaging and make it easier for buyers to find the relevant information on it. By the way, this design was created by Nina, who is one of our members students. And it was submitted for one of the many creative projects that we offer in this mentorship program. If you're interested about finding out more information on it, The link is in the description below. So now that I have this design loaded into Photoshop, I can use the plugin to test how this design is going to work. First of all, we have to choose what type of content this is. This is packaging. So I'm going to select that. But by the way, you can see that there's quite a lot of options here. And if for some reason it doesn't fall into any of these categories, you can always choose other. Because this plugin is using artificial intelligence. It helps if you choose the right category in the beginning. And after that, all you have to do is just simply hit Analyze. Now to make things faster and smoother, I already have a few results here, and I'm going to actually show you how I refine the design based on the feedback that I get from the plugin. I'm just going to turn on Show, which is going to give me a heat map first of all, but I can switch to hotspots and gaze sequence as well. It usually takes around ten to 20 seconds to generate analysis, mainly depending on the complexity of the design that you are running the analysis on. All the results are always generated as separate groups here on the right. So you can easily turn it on and off just to see the original design and the information that was generated by the plug-in. So when you are clicking on these options here on the left, you are actually switching between layers in the document. And by taking a look at the heat map, I can already see a couple of things. First of all, the brand name choke or Rica, is quite good. It stands out, but not as much as the illustration. What is completely lost is the actual information at the bottom. So that's not even covered by the gaze of the viewer according to the plugin, in this instance, the illustration itself is grabbing too much of the attention and important information is lost if we switch to hotspots, once again, it just confirms that the illustration is two dominant currently. But how does this plugin actually work? It's important to understand that in order to be able to improve our designs. So under the hood, the plugin is actually analyzing a complex relationship between the five visual elements that you can see here. So they add edges, intensity, red, green contrast, blue, yellow contrast and faces. And it is also important to mention that the plugin is actually simulating the first glance instead of conscious vision. So first glance is something that's universal around the world. And it is something that we do without thinking is that first 35 seconds when we look at something. So that's what the plugin can very closely simulate. Now, jumping back to our design, we can finally look at the gaze sequence, which is also very useful. This is essentially giving us the first four locations where our viewers eye will be attracted to. And in this case, all four of them are staying within the illustration. So they are not even going on the name on the top or the information at the bottom about the flavor and the type of chocolate that this packaging is four. So in terms of the goals of this design, that the information at the bottom, on the top should be noticeable or quickly recognizable. We are currently quite far away from. This is a good example of sometimes a nice colorful design can look pretty, but it might not be effective in terms of what is the actual goal of the product. So now that we've got our feedback from the plugin, Let's take a look at the second version of the design. This is a subtle change. So all I've done here is to make the illustration a little bit more deemed. So it has less contrast and less saturation. This way we are reducing the intensity and the edge contrast as well, and even the contrast for the colors as we've seen before. And I tried to make the information at the bottom much more dominant, so I just made it bigger. So let's take a look at the results now. Again, starting with the heatmap, that the reds are the most dominant details. And then it goes into yellow, green, and then blue. Blue marking the areas that still attract attention but the least attention compared to those other details. So we managed to achieve a little bit of improvement here, we have a little bit of the attention now going down on this information at the bottom. So viewers are likely going to read what type of chocolate this is, and maybe even the flavor. Which again, we can see if I just switch back to showing the design. So the raspberry texts there at the bottom, but unfortunately seal the illustration is two dominant and is still attracting too much attention. So if we switch to hotspots, that again confirms that this area here on the top is still not important enough or noticeable enough. And within the illustration there are areas which are really high contrast and they just really attract too much of the attention. If I switch to gaze sequence, that again shows that it all starts here on this waterfall, then jumps down on the information at the bottom, then comes back up to the bird again in the illustration. And only at the very end, it would go up to the logo on the top. Instead of this, I would prefer to see something like number one at the bottom, then number two on the top. And then number 34 can be somewhere in the illustration in the center. So once again, we have to go back to the drawing board and refine our design. So from this second version, I moved to a much more simplified version. It still has some of the original illustration, but in a much more simplified way. So we are trying to really keep the attention on the important elements and keep all the illustration more like a secondary read. So let's see again, the results for this version. Here is the heatmap. First of all, unfortunately, the illustration is still attracting quite a lot of the interests. And when we look at the hotspots, it seems like even a small background detail like this can confuse viewers. And instead of looking at the information here at the bottom, their eyes will be attracted to that unnecessary detail there, which is simply just there for the purpose of decoration. Then we switch to gay sequence. We can see it's still spending too much time here in the center, so we're still not there. But here is another version which is again further refined. Let me just switch back and forth between 34. As you can see, the main thing I've done here is to reposition some elements, also enlarge elements in the illustration. And most importantly, I moved this colorful bird to the bottom, since I know that it is attracting attention and I don't want to leave it out from the design, then it's probably best to place it where I want the attention to be directed to. Same thing with the sloth, although it is going to attract attention in the center, it is a good way to lead or transfer the attention from the two important details on the top and the bottom. Before I explain all my other design decisions and how I improve the design, let's take a look at the analysis of this version. So here is the heatmap, as just see again, the design and the heatmap. And we can see that it is much better already. So we have quite a lot of active areas here on the bottom and also on the top. But mainly what I'm interested in is to see the hotspots and the likelihood of the attention grabbed by the certain elements. And I can see now that the brand image or the logo is going to be the strongest ones where there's 84 per cent chance of people at paying attention to this part, then secondary is going to be this detail here at the bottom. And then only third is going to be the illustration in the center. So that is the right order that I wanted to achieve. But let's take a look at the k sequence as well. So similarly, it shows us number one on the top, then number two, number three, and number four again going back down. So I'm very happy with this. This is much better than what we started with. And just to understand what are the decisions I made, I'm just going to turn off the results and show you that even simple things as really dimming or the background elements can make a huge difference. So we can still see these leaves here, and it still creates that colorful jungle vibe. But compared to the original design, which was too colorful and too many little details added. This is much more controlled, but there are also little tricks use here to direct the attention of the viewer. Notice these triangles here at the bottom, which are supposed to be trees. They are all pointing to this area where I want to attract people's attention to. And even between these two details, the top and the bottom, we have these leaves acting as a little visual pathway between those two details that we wanted to highlight. It is important to understand that you as a graphic designer, is still in control and you are the one who has to make the decisions based on the analysis or the results that the plugin can generate. 12. Improving design based on VAS analysis: So understanding how to create effective compositions and using color, contrast, topography, and hierarchy is still very, very important for every graphic designer. You have to rely on your knowledge and improve that knowledge to be able to create better designs. And the plug-in is only there to help you make those decisions and iterate. Just like what I've done here, going through a couple of stages until I got to a point that I'm happy with. I can also show these results to my client. You can view and compare your VS analysis history in the web app if you sign up for a full subscription, which includes access to the web app and all the available plugins for Illustrator, Photoshop and Adobe XD. So we can easily compare the first version, the last one, by selecting them and choosing compare. And then we can switch between heatmap. Hotspots are gay sequence. And if we want, we can also download the report as a PDF that we can share with our client in case you are interested what is happening under the hood. You can also check out the visual elements tab, which creates these grayscale images showing exactly those five visual elements that we've talked about. The edges, the intensity, the different color contrast and faces. And in certain cases you might want to see these separately and maybe it will help you to further refine your designs. Now, jumping back to Photoshop, There's one other important feature that I wanted to highlight and that is the areas of interests. This is something that you can do in any of the Adobe applications by using the rectangle tool. And if I select this area here on the top and this area at the bottom, by selecting these two rectangles and choosing the convert to areas of interests option here on the left, the plugin is going to now understand that these are important details within the design. And if I go back now and run another analysis, this way, I will be able to concentrate on the two highlighted areas and really compare them with each other. So I can see in this instance, the brand details on the top are actually stronger than the details at the bottom. And this I would normally use as a final step after I refine everything and I know that the general design works, I can always refine small details like scaling things up and down, reducing contrast a little bit, and really just tweaking the final results by concentrating on these points of interests. In the beginning of the video, I mentioned that the plugin is also available for Illustrator and Adobe XD. And I just wanted to show with another one of our students work. In this case, it's Philips app design created here in Adobe XD. Here, the 3M visual attention software plugin will give you an additional option to be able to select up to four art boards to analyze and the same time. So in this case I can select this initial screen, then maybe this additional screen where we choose ingredients and then the orders. So I'm just simply holding down the shift key and selecting these art boards. I'm just going to zoom a little bit closer so we can see them better. And once I hit analyze, after a bit of loading, I will get again the same results on all the selected art boards. So we have our heatmaps, we have our hotspots, and also the gaze sequence. And already here on the first screen I can see that the social icons are just too big and attracting too much attention. Instead, we should have the login option much more noticeable. On this other screen, which is the checklist. Again, we can check our heatmap, the hotspots and the gay sequence. I think mainly based on the hotspots, the image is attracting a little bit too much attention. Again, here, we might need to balance things out a bit and make sure that the image is not attracting too much attention. And instead we have a bit more contrast or visibility on the actual ingredients here in the center. And that is all I wanted to show you in this video. I hope you found it interesting and insightful. It's always good to understand how to better engage viewers with your designs and how to improve your compositions with that first glance in mind. 13. PROJECT - Adobe Photoshop techniques: In Adobe Photoshop, when you open a PSD file, you will find older layers here in the Layers panel. And they are already organized in a way that it makes it easier to find things. So for instance, the text details are all grouped together. And also we have all of these elements here in the middle in that layer group. To be able to see them individually, you just have to open the group itself and then select a layer. However it is. However, there is a faster way to get to the layers. That is, if you use the Move tool, if you have the auto select option turned off, but make sure you have the layer features selected. You can use the command or control key to quickly click on Details and have them selected here in the layers panel. So that's a quick way to get to them. Now if you have the auto select on, this will automatically happen without holding down the keyboard shortcut that I just mentioned. I actually prefer it without the older select. So let's just make sure that I only switch layers when I really wanted to. Now let's just say we have this layer selected here in the middle. Instead of applying an adjustment directly to this layer, what I would recommend to do is to add an adjustment layer from this icon here at the bottom, you can find all the adjustments. But I recommend using the hue saturation most of the time when it's about fixing the colors of an existing detail. So now that this adjustment layer is added and we can double-click on this icon to get to the properties panel where we can make our changes. Here, we can start moving things around. But notice that when I'm doing this, it actually affects everything that's underneath this adjustment layer. So now only the layer we wanted to target, but everything else. It's important to understand that only details that are underneath will change. So for instance, this layer, which is the one on the right, as you can see, is not changing colors because that's above the other layers. Now while I'm moving this hue adjustment around, I can already see a couple of better compositions. So it can improve the contrast and the harmonies between the colors already doing it on a global level like this. But I recommend doing this more individually. So the way you can do that is by holding down the Alt or Option key and clicking between the adjustment layer and the layer you want it to target. That way you create a clipped adjustment layer or a clipping mask. And if I turn this layer on and off now we can see that the adjustment that we created is directly affecting the layer underneath it. And that's the only thing that changes when I move the hue slider around. Now besides the hue slider, you can also adjust the saturation so you can increase it or decrease it, making the colors more monochromatic or more pastoral. If it's just reduce saturation. And it's not really recommended to make changes with likeness, but you can also experiment with this if you want to. These can really wash out the colors. So it's better to rely mainly on hue and saturation changes for these exercises, you also want to avoid using the colorized feature because that just turns as selected layer into a single tint removes all the variations in use. So I am not going to turn that on. Instead, I'm just going to try to find a color that has enough contrast from its environment. And at the same time also works as a nice color harmony with all the elements together. So now if I hide this panel, you can see I can easily turn on and off the adjustment that I created. So it's completely non-destructive. And I can also double-click on that icon to get back to the changes that I applied and make further changes whenever I want to. Once you're done with all the improvements that you've created, makes sure to save the PSD file and export it as a JPEG, which will be the easiest way to upload it and share it. 14. PROJECT - Adobe Illustrator techniques: In Adobe Illustrator, you will be able to use a very handy feature to quickly achieve better results. This is called the re-color artwork feature. And I recommend using the selection tool, not the direct selection tool in this case. So with this, you can select larger components or groups of objects. In this case, this whole Banner can be selected like that. But if you are not sure about what you're selecting, It's also good to keep the layers panel open where you can really keep track of what you are currently targeting. So in this case, I can just check by turning on and off this selection that that's the banner that I'm going to make changes too. So once you are sure that you select it the right thing, you can just click on this icon here in the Options bar. In, in case you don't see this icon, just go to the Window menu and make sure you have the control option turned on. Once you click on the feature, it will open up this floating panel, which you can move around. And it will give you a couple of options. First of all, you can see all the colors included in the selection. And then you can also see the colors represented on this color wheel. Now I'm not going to go into too much detail on how this feature works because I'm going to show that in separate videos. But for now, I am just going to show you quickly if I just move these colors around, I can see how it changes the banner on the right. And when I get to a more pleasing result than the original, all I have to do is to click somewhere outside and then it's already applied. So if we want to now see before and after, we can use the undo feature. So it was before and redo to see the changes that we applied. Since the theme of these banners are spring and the spring is all about the nice fresh green colors. I feel like it's already working much better than the original one. But after applying the re-color artwork, we can of course go into selecting individual details like the background here, by using the direct selection tool, the white arrow. With this, I can target individual objects like the background in this case. And I can change its colors by using the color panel or the swatches panel. And I actually saved a couple of useful swatches here that you can experiment with. And you can see immediately how these change the composition. So if we want to get something very fresh or pale color in the background, that can help to establish more contrast. Of course, you can decide to use something darker than the background. Just keep in mind that you want to create a nice color harmony and also you want to have enough contrast. So one thing that steel is not working well in this case is this little ribbon here, which is the call to action part of the banner. So if I have that one selected, I can see that this is actually a gradient. So it's not a single color, it's a gradient. And the way we can change this easiest is by pressing G on the keyboard, which will bring up the gradient annotator. And then I can select individual colors within the gradient. So for instance, if I want to get rid of this brown color here, I can now just pick a color very quickly from the color panel or even the swatches panel. And once I find something that works well, let's just say maybe this purple, it actually creates more contrast. Then I can click away and take a better look at it. If I still want to make changes to it. Once again, I'm going to select it with the direct selection tool. Then press G on the keyboard, and I can then select another color. Maybe make that the brighter or something along the lines of this. And if I click away now, again, I can check whether it works or not. Now I still am not happy with this composition. What we managed to improve it compared to how it started. And in case you are not sure whether you are actually achieving improvements or not, what you can do is to create a duplicate art board by using the art board tool. Just hold down the Alt or Option key while dragging the artboard by its label. This way you will be able to easily keep track of the original banners and the versions that you are improving. Make sure you save the Illustrator file itself to be able to come back to the objects that you worked with and continue to make changes to them if you wish to, however, to be able to share the final result, make sure to save your work as a JPEG, either by going to export for screens or by taking a screenshot. And in case you use two art boards, you can even take a screenshot of them side-by-side, which will make it easier for everyone to see the changes that you achieved. Good luck and have fun with these exercises. I cannot wait to see how you implement all the things that we learned in this course and how much you will be able to improve the impact of these compositions by fixing that color harmonies and contrast. 15. PROJECT - Adobe Illustrator - Recolor Artwork: I have always been a big fan of the re-color artwork feature. You would want to use this feature normally when you want to improve the color palette of an illustration. For instance, we have a beautiful illustration here on the left side with gorgeous autumn colors. And on the right side we have two instances of the same illustration where I'm happy with the general composition, but I'm not a 100% sure on the colors. With the new and improved re-color artwork, we will be able to use the illustration on the left as a reference and match the colors for our illustration on the right. So let's test this out. I'm going to select this illustration here. Click on the re-color artwork icon here in the control bar. By the way, if you don't see this, just go to the Window menu and choose control. So once we have that selected, these new floating dialog box comes up, which we can move around easily. I'm just going to keep it somewhere in the middle. And notice that we have the option here called Color Theme Picker. So this is the cool new feature that I wanted to show you. I clicking on this, we can select an illustration. This is grouped here on the left side. And it is important because if you're not grouping things together, this tool won't be able to sample all the included colors at the same time. So once I click on it, you will notice it's been already applied on the right side, and I just intentionally kept the original version here in the middle so you can compare the two. But we can go much further than that if we want to only sample a certain area from that illustration on the left with the same color theme Picker, we can just draw around the area that we are interested in. Let's just say something like that. And immediately the illustration changes on the right side. Now let me go back to select all the colors once again, and then let's just refine a couple of things. This yellow color, I'm just going to move a little bit more towards the oranges, something like that. And then the tent with the green color looks quite nice. But maybe we want to also changed at slightly and go towards the purples here. I think that goes better with the general color palette. And you can order the compare the colors from before and after. But let's use the re-color artwork again, in this case on the illustration in the middle. I'm going to move this slightly to the left and show you a couple of additional cool features. First of all, the original colors that we have here, we can refine by adjusting these values here on the bottom. This is the brightness which we can reduce and make all the colors darker or brighter. We can also switch to saturation, where we can desaturate the colors by dragging them to the left or adding more vivid colors if you drag it to the right. This was already available in previous versions, but it was just much longer to get to. Now, with this quick menu is so much faster and easier to make these amounts. But my favorite new feature within the re-color artwork has to be the dominant colors section that we can play around with the proportions of the colors within the illustration. So for example, if I wanted to see more of this color, which is here on the right side, I can just drag it further to the left and you can see how it starts to take over the sky color. So if I drag it back, now we have more of that. Or again, I can track it back and then we have again more of the color on the right. We also have the two icons here with which we can randomize the colors. This one here randomizes the order of the colors, which can create quite surprising results. And then you also have the randomizing the saturation and brightness of the colors. Once again, these were available before. It's just faster to get to right now, we can always reset the colors quickly before exiting from re-color feature. And if you want to get to all of the advanced options or the original dialogue box, you can just click on Advanced option here at the bottom. And this should be the more familiar way of seeing the re-color artwork feature. If you have a group, you can just use the direct selection tool and highlight the parts that you wish to make changes too. So I used the white arrow tool or direct selection tool, highlight it the right side of this group. And now I'm going back to the same icon. Choose that, and then go back again, link harmony colors and drag it to the other side. So we quickly created a complimentary side to the original artwork. So on the left side we have the warm colors. On the right side we have the cooler tones. You probably can already see the potential in this tool, but let me walk you through everything that you can do with it. I'm going to actually switch back and forth between artwork here. So I have three different examples. Again, I have the original on the left and I'm going to apply the changes on the right. I'm going to include both the background in this case and the artwork itself. Go up to re-color artwork. And let's just start here in this tab called assign. There's these two main areas, the Edit and Assign. Now, when we add in assign, one of the first things that I like to do is to save the current colors as a new color group. That's the option up here on the top. If I click on that. It's going to generate this for me. And when I click Okay, it's actually going to generate that here in the swatches panel. Now, that is great. So we haven't actually changed any colors yet. We just created a color group. Of course, you can also do that by selecting something and clicking on the same icon here in the swatches panel. But whenever I work in Illustrator, I also like to keep things tidy. And in this case again, I would remove any unnecessary swatches so I can click on the panel menu, the swatches panel menu, choose Select All Unused, and then we can delete them. So just hitting the trash can and delete. And now we just have it simplified to that group of colors that we have currently in the illustration. Once again, I'm going to select these, go back to the re-color artwork feature and now you can see the color group stays there. So if I make any changes here, I'm just going to do quiet drastic change first of all, by choosing one of the harmony rules from the top. So this is the complimentary color option where you have the two opposite sides of the color wheel. And in this case, we have these colors, but of course we can move these around and we can also make them darker. Let's just say these ones as well. I'm going to reduce in brightness. And we set the colors up, something like that. That is already a quiet, nice duotone color palette. So we have the original color palette really simplified to two sets of colors. And you can see that here. So the original warmer tones were turned into this brownish, rusty color. And then we have all of the cooler tones turned into something similar to what they were originally as well. So these sets that were created the same hue just have variation in their saturation and brightness. But essentially we have two colors and we can actually see that up here as well. Now if I like this version, I can save these colors by clicking on the New Color Group option again. So now we have two sets it, and if I want to keep moving on and exploring different colors, I can come back here and maybe let's just change this around. Go towards purple or magenta, and also maybe change these and move them more towards the blue tones as well, something like that. Again, I can save this with the color group option. The cool thing is that once you have multiple color groups, you can switch back and forth between them. Now obviously, using the harmony rules are usually quite drastic in terms of reducing the amount of colors you have. If you want to be a little bit more subtle, reducing the amount of colors, there's a better way of doing that. And let me just show you this by going back to the original color version. So all you have to do is to click here in the section where it says auto. Notice also here on the left side, we can see the current color number. So there's 24 colors here. When I press the down arrow here in the color section, I'm going to reduce the colors just by one. So that's now 23. But I can then use the down arrows also on the keyboard or the up arrow to increase and decrease the amount. And let's just say I go down to 20. So I removed for colors. The way I can see the changes on the right is by simply clicking somewhere in the dialog box. So now that I've done that, I can see the difference. Well, at the moment for colors doesn't make much difference because probably there were quite a lot of similar colors. But if I go further than that, Let's just say I go down. Now, I can actually see these updating live on the right side. So as I keep reducing the colors, the amount of colors or reducing in the artwork as well, until I get back to the original colors. So I can start from the bottom as well, say two in this case that 3456 and so on and so forth. So this is a really cool way of checking how many colors you actually need, how many different colors you need. And that's a very common mistake with a lot of illustrators who are starting out that they are using too many colors. There's no harmony between them, or that's just completely overkill the amount of colors they have. Of course, that can also be a style. But I've seen it many times that by chest refining a little bit the amount of colors or just hues in the artwork can improve it a lot. So this feature, I highly recommend you check it out and play around the way the bit, just to see an experiment, what you can come up with and how you can improve your illustrations. Now whenever you want to quickly reset the colors without leaving the Recolor Artwork dialog box, you can just click on the eyedropper tool here on the top. So once you click on that, it goes back to the way it was before you came to this feature. And then when you want to have a better look at all the colors that you currently have here. Of course, you can scroll down and go through them. Notice then that the bottom you will have in case you have it in your artwork. The black and white colors, and by default they are not changing. So they are restricted or locked. In a way, you can unlock them if you want by clicking on the little arrows and also clicking on the color swatch area next to them, you have to say you want to add a new color there. And now these will also change whenever you are applying re-color options here. So I'm just going to remove this again. I want to keep them black and white at this point. But I'm going to show you a really cool feature and this is one of my favorite options, which is really hidden away. It's on this little drop-down menu here. So in the color selector area, you can go into the different color modes like RGB, CMYK, Lab, even. But the best one is the Global Adjust. When you click on that, what you can do is to adjust the saturation, increase or decrease globally on the artwork, which is a brilliant option. So it's basically like the saturation feature in Photoshop. You can pump up the colors or reduce the intensity of the colors. And then similarly to that, you can also increase the overall brightness. Our reduce the brightness. And I like the fact that there is also a separate luminosity option, which as you can see, does a slightly different thing. So this can go all the way up to white and the brightness won't actually reach white is just going to create the brightest version of each of those colors. So it's slightly different those two. And then the other really cool feature here is temperature. So I'm just going to reset the colors and then start increasing temperature, which will make everything really warm. And then I can go the opposite direction when we can make everything really cold. It's almost like a day and night transition from we can we can go from the daylight to nighttime. And then I drag it all the way to the right. In this case, it looks like an autumn color scheme. So even just by playing with the temperature, you can get to so many different interesting variations. Now, if you want to just change a specific color, you can also do that. But first of all, you need to find it. So here in this list, you can find a certain color. Let's just say this one here. And just to double-check, where is this color in the artwork, you can click on this icon with that one. You can highlight exactly where it is. And this is actually a toggle that you can turn off. So once you know where those colors are, you can turn it off. And then you go back to see the original or actual colors or current colors. But if you keep this on, you can even toggle through quickly all the different colors in the artwork and you can see where they are. Now, you have to actually click on it to keep seeing it. But click and holding will show you temporarily where those colors are. So for example, if I just go down a bit, we have some nice colors here. Now, I can turn this off so we can see what's going to happen. But by having this color now selected, I can start playing around with things. Maybe go back to RGB values or hue saturation brightness. And if I just start moving the hues around, you can already see those colors changing. So this is a much more controlled way of making changes because I know exactly which colors I'm messing with and where are they in the artwork. So in a way, it's like a search feature that they like on there. Now next to it, we have two other icons which I also like to use. These are the randomizer features. So again, I'm going to go back to the original colors and maybe let's just move on to another illustration just so we can see something else. I'm going to select the re-color artwork. I'm going to try this first icon here. This is the option to randomly change the color order. So what this does is it's going to shuffle the colors around, so it's not going to change. The color. Palette is just shuffles the colors around. So when I click on that, you can see it happening already. And even if you are using gradients in your artwork, like in this case, is going to work really nicely. And it creates some very interesting variations. You can see already the difference there. So it's still very similar because we are just using the same colors in a different order, but it creates really cool and unique variations. If I want to mess things up a little bit more, I can use the other option as well, which is going to randomize the order of the colors, but also their saturation and brightness. So when I click on that, then I will start to see more unique variations as well. So you can just apply changes with one icon and then apply changes with the other one. And then you will eventually start to get more difference between the original and the new one. Now this is really, as I said, just shuffles colors and randomize these things. So you don't really have much control over it. If you want more control, I would suggest to use the other tab called Edit. Because this is where you can see all the colors on a color wheel. So still we can go back to the original colors by clicking on the eye dropper tool. And then what I'm going to do is to first of all move one of these colors around. So you can see as I'm moving it around on the color wheel, I see immediately the changes here on the right. By moving it on the color wheel, I'm adjusting its hue and saturation. The further the color is to the edge of the color wheel, the more saturated it is, and the closer it is to the center, the more desaturated it will be. And of course, the color wheel has the 360 degrees of all the colors we have in the spectrum. So we can use it like this, but we can also switch to this mode here under the color wheel, which is going to change the way the color wheel works. In this case, the hue is still going to work the same way. But now instead of the saturation, we have the brightness of the colors. Darker scholars are going to be in the center and brightest colors will be on the edge. And there's always a third property that you can adjust as well. And that is with this slider here. So when you have the brightness set on the color wheel, then here below you will have this saturation, which obviously will affect all the colors, not just a selected one. This is like a global setting here. If I switch back again to the original hue wheel, then I can adjust the brightness here below. So these are very useful features when you are working in the edit mode. You can be very specific about the colors that you are changing. Plus you can also see them much better, so you have a better understanding of what you're doing with them. But the best thing you can do here is the link harmony colors option. So once you do that, it looks the colors together so they will maintain the relative differences between them. Which means that if I start moving any of them around, all of the colors are going to change together. I can very quickly come up with completely different looks. There could be too colorful nights from different factions fighting against each other in this illustration. But of course, we can do additional things here in this mode, we can switch to these different views, like the color bars. So instead of seeing them as a color wheel, you can see them as bars. And when you have the bars, you will get the same options that we had in the Assign tab. So the randomizer options. But you can also manually drag and drop colors around to swap them. So if you drag maybe one of these colors here from the right, one of the green colors, and you drop them into one of the purple ones. You can see how they swapped around and I can move it back as well. So that is sometimes also an interesting feature, especially if you don't have too many colors in an artwork. It could be useful to check this out and to show you a couple of more things, I'm going to switch back to the second artwork, and I go to re-color artwork. So again, we here we have 24 colors. And let's just say we would like to join a few of them together because you feel like they're too similar. So instead of having three separate colors for these pale pinks or peach colors, I can merge them together by drag and drop them onto each other. The rows you just drag and drop them onto each other. And now you can see we have three colors here that are all merged into one. Maybe we can do the same here down and drag these two as well, merged them together. Maybe even these two can be merged together. And then we're just simplifying really the colors. So it is similar when we are using the reduction, but in this case we're doing it manually and it can help sometimes to be more in control. So now I feel like all the yellow colors are pretty much here together. If I start making changes, I can very quickly turn anything that was originally yellow into more, let's say purple in this case, or blue. But going back to the complimentary settings that we had before, when you have a lot of the original colors compressed into just two colors. In these cases, sometimes you might feel like you would like to have a separation between them. So you like what you're saying, but maybe some of the original colors should be separated. So similarly to merging, you can also unmerged some of the colors. So let's say in this case, I would like to grab the yellow colors, all of these. And to separate them, all you need to do is to click on this icon. So I selected them by holding down the Shift key. So I can add multiple colors once again and then click on that icon there on the left. And now you can see we have our yellows back to normal. Now of course, if I still want to make changes to them, I can just apply a change and then adjust the hue and so on and so forth. So you have a really very accurate control over which colors are going to be turned to. What end are so many different ways with this tool that you can achieve amazing results. 16. Conclusion: Congratulations on completing this course of the graphic design theory series. I hope you found it useful and inspiring. Don't forget to go through the glossary of terms PDF, review everything we covered, and if you feel ready, take the quiz to test your knowledge. Come back anytime to the references on the millenial boards we used in this course to help you remember the things we talked about or define inspiration for your next design project, please let us know if you felt there was anything missing from this course or if you have any suggestions on how we can improve it, email us at info at the assignment designer.com, and we will get back to you as soon as possible. We really appreciate your input and help. Now, it's time for you to pick your next topic and dive into another graphic design theory course. Remember, there is no right or wrong order to complete this series. All the rules we cover are equally important and everything is related. But what is most important is getting a good understanding of these rules and applying them in your projects. I'm sure you will use what you've learned to create something amazing. And I cannot wait to see it.