Today we looked at colour, and also brand guidelines. Colour is usually the last aspect that a brand decides on, and once the colour is chosen, the design process is usually near completion. It is a very important process choosing the colours, and there are a lot of things to consider such as colour contrast, what colour gamut is used, and colour psychology must be considered before choosing the colour of your brand or project. In class today we looked in detail on the process of choosing colour, and what needs to be considered carefully before they are chosen.
RGB - This is used for digital screens, standing for red, green, and blue. These colours are combined in a range of different ways to display other colours.
CMYK - This is the colour gamut that is used for printing, standing for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. When using CMYK, you must choose the right values for each colour to get the desired final colour.
It is important to find the correct values for each gamut for your brand, so that you can use different mediums to display your designs on. This will take some playing around to find what value fits what.
Each colour naturally provokes a different emotion. This can be used tactically by brands to make customers feel a certain way by only seeing the colour scheme of the logo, the app, or even what colours are used inside the building. It is important to have a good understanding of colour emotion as a designer, as when choosing colours, we must be able to relate them back to the brand values, and what the brand is trying to achieve. This is very interesting as some brands that I use, take great advantage of this, such as Apple using black and white to represent that they are clean and sophisticated, or McDonald’s, who use red and yellow to show that they are exciting and cheerful. It is also important to consider how colours mean different things around the world, for example in Asian countries, red is a very prestigious colour which represents good fortune, whereas in western culture it means love or something important.
When designing for UI, there are two different types of colours that are used. The first one is primary and secondary, or brand colours, which are the main colours that are used in the brand, and these don’t really change. The other is accent, or tertiary colours, which are the colours that are used for different purposes within the design system. This promotes variety, and to keep the brand fresh. The primary colours are what people think of when the brand is mentioned, and the accent colours are what people use without realising it. Below is a graphic that shows roughly the percentage that each colour gets used on a UI.
A brand guidelines document is a communicative document that shows all the different design components of the brand. Brand Guideline documents show the design decisions such as the word mark, the typeface, the colours etc. This is helpful for other people to then to understand why you made the different decisions, and to find out information of the different components that are included within the design of the brand. A brand guidelines is basically a textbook for finding out the design of a brand. It works by screen, and each screen goes through the different aspects of the brand design. The brand guidelines should match the design of the brand itself. A brand guidelines document should include: