When starting a composition in graphic design, it’s tempting to start with eye-catching, bold color. I want you to begin somewhere else. In most of our lives, for most of our days—especially here in the rainy, gray Pacific Northwest—we are surrounded by neutral shades. These are important. They make up most of our color landscape. So why shouldn’t they make up more of our compositions as designers? In the natural world, we see bright colors only in small amounts, which gives our eyes lots of rest—rest in the neutrals that surround us, not only in the world around us, but in the natural colors of ourselves (our skin, hair, etc.).
The other day I was working with another Ooligan designer on some graphic design. She was trying to find the right cream color for the background of the design she was working on, which featured a small amount of teal and orange on top of a cream background. She was working with a complementary color scheme, a tried and true color combination that we see all the time. That part was easy; the bright colors that every online color wheel emphasizes in its shifting rainbow are easy to find and place nearer to each other. It’s those neutrals that are harder to pin down. Creams come in all kinds of undertones, with a huge range of warmth and coolness. Anyone who has ever repainted a house knows the struggle of picking out the right white paint for an interior wall. The same dilemma was present with us. What was wrong with the cream we had? What would make it better? It was difficult to tell at first glance.
Because I couldn’t immediately make a recommendation at first glance, I decided to put the design into a color-wheel application and extract the main colors so that I could see them on a wheel. I figured that with the abstract objectivity of a color wheel, I would be able to sort out the composition’s color relationships more correctly. I extracted the theme, grabbing two of the most clear hex codes of blue and orange to give myself a baseline of the complementary relationships between the colors. I then selected a clear hex code of the cream background and plotted that on the color wheel. I found that the cream’s undertone, which I couldn’t quite see before, was actually quite centrally located in the red section of the color wheel, disrupting the harmony of the dominant complementary color scheme. I pulled it over to the orange side of the wheel, between the two oranges I extracted earlier, keeping it still in that super-light cream space, and took a new hex code.
When I tried the new hex code in the background of the design, suddenly the cream made sense. There was an underlying logic to the whole composition in a flash; all the colors were now related through the same dominant color relationship of blue and orange, and so the cream no longer had an aberrant color relationship that was disrupting the harmony of the composition. I recommended the new hex code to my colleague.
This exercise in color relationships showed me with new urgency the real difference that neutrals can make in a design. Because they are the colors that we expect to flood our lives, taking over the majority of the colors that we see on a daily basis, when they are wrong it is deeply unsettling. Finding the right neutrals that compliment the internal logic of the colors in any given design allows that design to work within the constraints of its own color logic, contributing to an overall more harmonious composition.
Written by: Marielle LeFave