Basic Color Principles

Color is a very important part in making graphic design choices, therefore it is important to be aware
of how colors mix with one another to produce other colors. All colors are made up of three components: Red, Yellow, and Blue, they are known as "primary Colors" .

By mixing pairs of primary colors you can produce another kind of basic colors, known as "Secondary Colors", like orange, green, and violet. Yellow and red make orange. Red and blue make purple and blue and yellow make green. By further mixing of the two secondary colors you can produce "Intermediate Colors".





The image shows a color wheel with twelve segments displaying the primaries, secondaries and intermediates.

Complementary Colors
Refers to colors that are 176 degree opposite from each other on the color wheel. These colors are
in extreme contrast to each other. Red and green, or purple and yellow are complementary colors.

Other color Properties
1. By adding white you can lighten your result which is known as "Tint".

2. By adding black you can darken the result creating what is called "Shades".

3. "Hue" distinguishes one color from another color.

4. "Value" identify the amount of light or dark within a color.

5. "Intensity" refers to saturation or chroma, also known as brightness.

CMYK Color
The CMYK color is what we use when printing in full color, an it stands for: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and black. CMYK colors are also known as subtractive color meaning cyan, magenta and yellow are mixed in equal intensity and make black.

RGB Color
RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue and these colors are also known as monitor colors. RGB colors are also known as additive color because when red, green, and blue are mixed together in equal intensity make white. RGB color comes directly through the monitor, straight into your eyes. Web pages are always displayed on a monitor, as a result every image you create for a web page should be saved in the RGB mode.

Browser-Safe Color
Also, known as web-safe color are only 216 colors that are common to the browsers and operating
systems of different computers. If you use any other color outside the common 216-color palette,
the browser will convert the odd color to the closest color it can find in the system palette, or it
will mix several colors an in that way to match the odd ones as closely as possible.