| Technical Aspects of Color |
Before you can go choosing red over blue or mixing light and dark colors, you need to know how color works in print and on the Web.
In the five pages of supplemental material for this lesson you'll explore color wheels, tints and shades, complementary colors, CMYK, hexidecimal numbers, and other terminology and concepts that are important both in selecting appropriate colors for your designs and for specifying those colors whether you are printing to your desktop, a commercial printer, or putting pages on the Web.
While there is a lot of material covered, color is an extremely complex topic and this lesson is only meant to get you acquainted with some basic color concepts.
• 1: Color Wheels
• 2: RGB & CMYK
• 3: Hues, tints, shades, saturation
• 4: Perception
• 5: Specifying Color
Hands-On Exercise
With paper and pencil or in your favorite graphics program recreate the color wheels discussed in part 1, above. For each color, write down the adjacent and the complementary or contrasting colors for each. Draw your own color swatches (or tear bits of color from magazines) and place together 'clashing' colors to see if they really do clash.
If you have access to multiple browsers and/or more than one computer, visit the same Web site with each browser and each computer and look at the way pages, especially colors, display differently on each.
