Color Palettes (The make or break of a great design)

Creating a color palette for your design is fairly simple but if your not careful can completely ruin your design. Or choose the right color palette could take your design to a whole new level of amazing. We are going to discuss how to choose the colors, Blacks and Whites, light and dark, and the uses of color in a design. And I will also touch on the marketing value of choosing the right colors.

1. Choosing Colors

You must begin with you photo or photos you are using in the design. For the purpose of this post I will be speaking mainly about Photoshop, and photo-composition design. What I am going to do is step-by-step us through this process. Below is a sample photo that we are going to reference.

You have two major colors in this photo and a couple of minor ones. most color palettes consist of one, two, three, four, and five colors. Never more than five colors. This photo has a orange-yellowish color, a brownish color, some white, some black, and a little bit of blue. This is a great photo with lots of white space that will come in handy later. This is going to become a Custom Church Invitational Postcard. So to get our colors we use the eye drop tool in Photoshop to sample the various colors. There are darker and lighter versions of each color all throughout the picture. The color you need is dependent on what you are doing with it.

Black and White

These two basic colors go with just about anything. These two colors are used mainly for type added to your design. The rule of thumb is dark pictures require white text and light colors require dark text.

Dark and Light colors

You can also choose dark or light colors out of the picture itself. For Example below I chose a dark brown color out ou the bottom for my text over the yellow area.

The color for your text comes from the picture or else its black or white. If you introduce a color that is not in the picture it increases the cheese factor greatly. Now this is not always true when you add a picture to the comp. For example:

Here I introduce a blue colored texture to a basically all brown design. What makes it work good together? If you simply added a blue color it would be cheesy. But when the design is very earthy and you add a earthy blue texture it just goes. Plus you can have three colors in a design. In this design before I added the blue texture only had two colors. Which can be ok, but many times adding that third color adds pizzaz to the overall design. And then notice the color of the words is  a gradient going from the dark brown to light brown then till white. And the brown colors are sampled out of the design.

One last thing. You can use a sample of the color in the picture to enhance the picture. Here is how: 

I will sample a light blue/gray out of this and lay a square shape over the top of the picture and set it too overlay. As you can see it enhanced the picture.

I hope this has bee of help to you.

Benjamin Smith has been a graphics designer with IFB Design for four years and has worked with many other organizations. Ben is a graphic designer who loves a challenge. He is a highly creative and multi-talented Graphic Designer with extensive experience in multimedia, marketing and print design. accustomed to performing in deadline-driven environments with an emphasis on working within budget requirements. Creative experience in the following: Brochures & Newsletters, Logos & Business Cards, Posters & Post Cards, Stationery, Banners, Book Cover Design and Layout, Magazine Design and Layout, Catalog Design and Layout. In addition Ben is an talented web designer, videographer, and editor, DVD Authoring, CD/DVD Wrap and Label Design