As part of our Quick Design Tips series, we will be covering a lot about colors, color use, prover vs improper, safe vs unsafe and so forth.

A color is essentially your groundwork for making your design stand out, look unique, and most of all, look professional.

Primary and Secondary Colors

Sadly enough, there are many self-taught designers who absolutely have no idea what the difference between primary, secondary complementary, and tertiary colors are. This is essentially the groundwork for creating color schemes that match and are compatible with each other.

Primary Colors are your “core” colors. From these colors, you can create various degrees of other colors such as the ones we see in the above picture. Primary colors come in two groups with three primary colors in each morel:

1. Additive Model Colors are colors that are produced from a black background creating three main colors: Red, Green, and Blue. These three colors are the primary colors for the additive model and are also known as the RGB Model. And as the name mentions, when you overlap each of these three colors, you end up with other colors (as seen below).
2. Subtractive Combination coloring is opposite of the traditional RGB model. In contrast to the Additive model, colors in this model are reflected off of a white background, so instead of getting your standard colors Red, Green, and Blue, you see Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (also referred to as the primary colors of the subtractive system – or the CMY Model).

   QUICK TIP: Most people print on white paper, which is the reason why you have Cyan, Yellow, and Magenta cartridges in your printer rather than Red, Green, and Blue.

Examples of Combining Colors:

• Red + Green  = Yellow ; Yellow + Magenta = Red
• Blue + Green = Cyan ; Cyan + Yellow = Blue;

The Inverse Relation:

• Cyan + Magenta + Yellow = Black
• Red + Green + Blue = White

Secondary Colors

Secondary Colors are also a simple term to understand. Secondary colors are any combination of two primary colors.  This means looking at the color diagrams above, these colors would be where the circles overlap. (i.e. blue, green, red in one diagram; cyan, magenta, and yellow in the other)

Complementary Colors

Another term used often is complementary colors. These are colors opposite of each other on the color wheel as shown in the diagram below.

Tertiary Colors

Finally, in order to make our color wheel complete, there is another color mix we add to the group. This is a combination of a primary color with its adjacent secondary color resulting in what is called a tertiary color.

The Color Wheel

Combining all of the terms above, we now have a complete color wheel which we will explain how to use effectively to create professional color schemes for your designs.

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