Color Theory
If I were to show you a random color and ask you what you would call it, what would you say? If you speak English, you most likely will use something along the eleven colors on the “R.O.Y.G.B.I.V.” color wheel spectrum. But, if your native language is from a more remote part of the world, you probably would use only three words to describe the same spectrum. Thats because not all languages have the same number of basic color categories.
In English, we use eleven and in Russian, they have twelve, but some languages only have three or four. Researchers have found that if a language only has three or four basic colors, they can usually predict what those colors will be in that language. As you would expect, different languages have different names for colors, but what has interested researchers isn’t the translations, it’s the question of which colors even get named at all.
For Western cultures, every color breaks down into three fundamental ingredients, Hue, Saturation and Value. Some languages use difference perimeters to distinguish colors like Light vs. Dark, Strength vs. Weakness, and Witness vs. Dryness. Those kind of languages don’t fit into our color identification system.
As much as we think of colors in categories, the truth is that color is a spectrum of endless gradiants blending from one to the next. It is not obvious why we have a basic color term for red, but not for something like yellowish-green. Until 1969, two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin published a book after finding hints of a universal pattern. It was suggested that as languages developed, they create color names in a certain order. First black and white, then red, then green, then yellow, blue and eventually others like brown, purple, pink and gray.
It led to believe that there’s something about the colors themselves that creates a hierarchy that is justified by how distinct a color is perceived. Despite our many differences across cultures and societies, there is something universal about how humans try to make sense of the world.
Hue is the color you are looking at. It is the main ingredient in a color recipe. It is the most distinctly exact, like a bullseye on a dartboard, color within a range of colors such as red, blue, green, yellow, etc. There are a variety of reds that we can perceive, but there is a bullseye red that has the least amount of blue, green, yellow, etc. mixed into it to distinguish it as anything other than itself.
The second attribute of color is saturation. It is the intensity of a hue. Think of it as the level of spice in a flavor. Think of a color; if you add too much saturation, it goes into an unnatural, florescent variation. Conversely, if you dial back the saturation, you loose the intensity and that same color now becomes very dull to almost a gray as if looking at the color through the fog.
Now the last part to any color is value. Value is the brightness of a color. There are two terms you will hear for value, tint and shade. Tint is a brighter version of hue, meaning it’s appears to have more white in it or it appears to have a bright light aimed at it while a shade is a darker version, meaning it appears to have more black in it or a dim light aimed away from it.
When using colors, the less is more rule will typically be in your favor. If we’re going back to the cooking analogy, you don’t need to use every spice on the shelf for every meal. A little goes a long way when it comes to saturation. Think of your color scheme like music, you don’t want all the volume of all your instruments set to 11 the whole time. The last consideration is creating contrast. Without light, there is no dark, without happiness, there is no sadness. The extreme ends help us indefinitely what is moorland less important, what you want to call to attention.
When things are shown in grey-scale, you can see check the value (brightness) of your color choices to make the proper adjustments.