Shades and Tints of Color
In using adjacent or harmonizing colors, you can achieve a greater degree of legibility by adding black or white to one of the hues -- changing the saturation and value of a hue. Black creates a darker shade of the hue. White creates a lighter tint of the shade. Where a yellow and yellow-green pairing may be too close to work well together, using a darker shade of green can help the combo to really pop.
This is just a basic introduction. Play around with saturation, and value to create tints and shades of various hues using this interactive Color Scheme Creator at Colorspire. Or, use the color features in your favorite graphics software to experiment with hue, saturation, and value. Some graphics software may use intensity, brightness, or lightness to refer to the value of a hue.
Create Contrast with Black and White
WHITE is the ultimate light color and contrasts well with dark colors such as red, blue, or purple. BLACK is the ultimate dark color and makes lighter colors such as yellow really pop out.
Any single or multiple colors can change — or rather our perception of them changes — due to the other surrounding colors, the proximity of the colors to each other, and the amount of light. That's why a pair of colors that may clash when placed side-by-side, can work and look good when separated on the page or used with other colors.
A light color appears even lighter when it is adjacent to a dark color (including black). Two similar colors side by side may appear as two distinct colors but placed far apart they start to look like the same color.
Paper and Emotions Affects Color Perception
The amount of light we perceive in a color is also affected by the surface on which it is printed. A shiny RED corvette printed in a magazine ad on slick, glossy paper is not going to look the same as the RED corvette printed in the newspaper ad. The papers absorb and reflect light and color differently.
Color Meanings
Additionally, our color choices are often dictated by the emotions that specific colors and color combinations evoke. Certain colors create physical reactions. Some colors and color combinations have specific meanings based on traditional and cultural usage.
- Cool Color Meanings (calming): Blue, Green, Turquoise, Silver
- Warm Color Meanings (exciting): Red, Pink, Yellow, Gold, Orange
- Mixed Cool/Warm Color Meanings: Purple, Lavender, Green, Turquoise
- Neutral Color Meanings (unifying): Brown, Beige, Ivory, Gray, Black, White
