Thursday, October 20, 2011

Color and Design - Lecture Notes

Additive mixing - only used by digital media (on screen). The light interacts with light.

Subtrative mixing - used for printing. The light interacts with a surface. Consists of cyan, magenta and yellow.

Hue: family name of a color such as red, green, blue. It suggests symbolic or psychological aspects associated with color. It is also an expressive aspect of color.

Value: Lightness or darkness of a color. It contains more than 90% of the information in a design or composition.

According to Goethe, views are more comfortable with combinations that show the darker value as more dominant. For example, M&M bag designs.

Chroma: Purity of a color - strong to weak (looks more and more gray).

Value and Chroma also suggest space. On a dark background, objects that are lighter in value and stronger in chroma appear to advance in space.

Atmospheric perspective (aerial) shows colors receding in space on a light background. As colors go back in space they get lighter in value and weaker in chroma.

Ambiguous space: some colors advance on a dark background others advance on a light background.

Color unity: strategies employed by artists and designers to convey an idea more clearly, such as:
1. through use of hue, value, or chroma dominance.
2. limited palette can also help create color unity.
3. analogous hues - hues next to each other on the color wheel.
4. transitions in hue, value, or chroma create color unity by eliminating big visuals, slowing viewers path through the picture plane.
5. use of neuttrals - blacks, whites, grays.
6. soften contrast - weaken chroma.

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