• Tweet

1: Harmonise with colour wheels
Stick to a harmonious colour scheme rather than using random colours. Use a colour wheel to help you choose colours. A colour wheel is simply a spectrum bar bent around a circle. It becomes easy to work out colours based on opposite, adjacent, rectangular and triangular patterns.

Colour Matters
Free Colour Wheel Calculator

2: Put schemes into shade
If you have selected an effective colour scheme this will then limit you to using a handful of colours. You can now add variety by using these colours as tints. For example a bold colour can be used as a shade e.g 15% for a background. Further variety can be gained by using gradients of these colours.

3: Embrace blue hues
It’s said that the human eye can distinguish between a greater variety of hues at the blue end of the spectrum. So, colour schemes based on blues will often work best. Hence, reds alongside pinks tend to clash and may give the impression that you have made an error.

4: Make adjacent colours work
Colour perception is also affected by colours around it. For example placing white near a colour will make it look cooler; black makes it appear to be warmer.

5: Illusions of depth
Adjust saturation and lightness to create an illusion of depth. The higher the saturation objects will appear bolder and nearer, while lower saturation and less brightness will make them appear further away.


6: Balance your composition
Saturated colours will dominate a design making other colours appear muddy. For printed documents it is better to tone down primary colours with intermediate colours. For example adding a little purple to yellow will make it duller.

7: Sharpen text on backgrounds
Small text is more easily read when it is coloured in sharp contrast with its background. Be warned that direct complementary colours taken from a colour wheel do not often work well for text legibility. e.g blue type on an orange background.

8: Avoid tinted body text
In print work keep in mind the limitations of the print process. A colour that contains a 10% magenta tint can end up looking dotty in body text, white text on a tinted background can also appear to have rough edges. As a general rule, try to use saturated colours for your body text.

9: Look for metamerism
Colours appear differently when viewed under different light sources, this effect is known a metamerism. Paper may appear to be brilliant white in sunlight but will appear yellow under a light bulb. Try to standardise by checking what you see under a D50 lamp. (one that is adjusted to 5,000K white point.)

10: Using black outlines
Page design objects such as boxes and star bursts can look subtle when filled with only colour and no stroke around the edge. Adding a black outline can make the fill colour appear more saturated, hence a thicker outline will make the colour appear even stronger.

11: Colour meaning
Don’t worry too much about the ‘meaning’ of colour. There is a lot written about colour symbolism, while generalizations about warm and cold are universal, as is the idea of red being bold and blue being serious, a lot of additional interpretation is dependent on cultural influences.

12: Mixing spot inks
Print jobs that use just one spot colour plus black can be given more visual variety not just by applying the colour in shade tints but also by mixing it with black tints. This allows you to adjust the lightness as well as saturation attributes of the spot colour.

13: Leave colour corrections to the end
Image enhancement is a destructive process, as soon as you begin editing a picture in Photoshop you are effectively throwing parts of the original image away. This includes colour adjustment. Try to leave colour correction (including levels and curves) to as late as possible in the workflow. If you need to supply images in CMYK format, leave the conversion until the very last moment.

14: Desaturate the colours
All non-Postscript printer drivers include a default colour enhancement option that makes printouts look prettier by saturating the colours. In a professional design workflow you must disable it, otherwise your proofs will be inaccurate. How this is done differs from printer to printer, you may merely need to untick an ‘enhancement’ option or set ‘quality’ options to ‘none’.

15: Quick fix for images
For everyday print jobs that don’t allow the luxury of time spent enhancing in Photoshop, try this two-step quick fix. First, using the levels window, drag the midtone slider a little to the left and the shadow slider a little to the right. Second, using the hue/saturation window, increase saturation by +15. These actions solve the most common problems with average-quality news and PR images, which otherwise tend to go dark and muddy when printed on a litho process.

About Jo

I'm the owner of Jo's Web, a professionally qualified graphic designer who has been involved in the industry for over 20 years. I have worked as an art editor for London publishing houses, B.B.C , Haymarket and now run Spiral Pixel Design.

• View all posts by Jo →
• Blog
• Twitter
• Facebook