Tactics Applied To Craft The Best Graphic Design

Hanna Landis
6 min readFeb 10, 2021

In your school days, you might have learned about the basics of color, including the understanding of a color wheel that plays an essential role when you need to create a ravishing color scheme. It was all about the color harmony at that time. Still, as you grew older and chose the “Graphic Designing” profession as a chief source of your income, it certainly makes you want to take a deep dive into color psychology — the way the human mind perceives color.

Know that good design cannot come to life if the illustration is using both red and orange in parallel, maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but it will undoubtedly unleash a negative impact on your client, and within a blink of an eye, he/she might fly off the handle. More severity can come in if your client is having second thoughts over your hiring. So, instead of fixing the damage later on, why don’t you take precautionary measures from now onwards?

The lack of clarity colors can simulate will eventually make you lose your highest-paying client, and we being the slaves to money can’t afford to let go of any single dollar.

Science Behind Color Psychology

Any logo or pictorial can’t do well without a color that promotes a sense of similar behavior, the brand itself represents. An impressionist logo with an absent emotion can knock down the entire logo design and vigorous efforts of a designer in one breath. However, the masterminds behind HL Graphic Design Studio in Tacoma take into consideration this and brings to light the ways that color and psychology affect the graphic design process.

Color is one of the most potent elements of the signifier (the logo) or other design patterns. It initially sets the brand tone and next off interacts with the viewers on a personal level. Primary colors commonly known as conceptual colors (magenta, yellow, and cyan; or red, green, and blue) are incorporated into the design to preach complicated lessons and concepts. The majority of the people have different preferences over a favorite color or color they often love to point out in their every design. Not only humans but animals also behave partially to specific colors. The definition of a dominant color comes from its ability to be universally understood.

For instance: Do you react differently than your friend to a logo that has outlines of blue and fill color yellow? Well, using the appropriate color combination is the key to influence the way a viewer feels about a particular composition. Pay attention to another case that involves bright green colors that, by looking at it, you’ll get the nature vibe rolled up in freshness, safety, harmony, and a clean environment. Such a logo can be used to evoke a renewable energy idea for a company with matching needs. This is the reason, and we cannot stress enough the use of colors for their websites, advertisements, and on their products so that it conveys the exact mission of the business.

Trigger Your Customer to Take Action

Additionally, keep in mind that the right color can trigger the desired action from a consumer, and this is what you’ll notice through our graphic design packages where creativity meets all ends of professionalism to deliver something like never before. These packages can even be customized to give your business an image that suits and above everything else, a pocket-friendly branding experience. We are also involved in customer-driven brand management that, in the long run, effectively converts leads into sales.

Our goal is straightforward. We help your brand climb the ladder by understanding the game of color palette to produce a design that can be admired throughout the global marketplace.

On one end of the spectrum, while colors are granted different names and pronunciations in different languages, the intensity continues to remain consistent. Today also, colors are associated with strong emotions and vitally used to enhance critical thinking.

Welcome To The All-Time Phenomenal Color Guide

Here we’ll do a personality assessment of each individual color.

Warm colors

Colors such as red, orange, and yellow and their variations produce by mixing two or more of these colors denote warm colors. They carry the sentiments of positivity, passion, happiness, enthusiasm, and revitalization.

Red Color (Primary Color)

Red signifies passion, strong emotions (anger, violence, fire breakout, danger, etc.), excitement, love, confidence, comfort, warmth, and is used to create a severe impact such as abruptness or seek attention.

For example: Stop signs and traffic signals.

Orange (secondary)
In simple words, orange is a subtle mix of red and yellow. It promotes energy, health and vitality, friendliness, beauty, earthiness, seasonal change, and affordability. In general, it’s a sign of proper social behavior.

Example Usage: restaurant menus

Yellow (primary)
Yellow is famous for the saying “Yellow yellow dirty fellow,” however, in reality, it’s a lively color. Furthermore, yellow takes pride in creating a sunny, cheerful, attention-grabbing, happiness, hope impression all the way.

Example Usage: Sharp yellows for Parties, gatherings, and celebrations, soft yellows for products and services involving children; golds and darker yellowish-orange for an antique appeal.

Cool colors
All the colors that fall under the category of green, blue, and purple and their tertiary variations are the cool colors. In contrast, cool colors are more reserved, relaxed, professional, and calming than warm colors.

Green (secondary)
Green is a natural color that, on a positive side, promotes growth, health, new beginnings, money, renewal, calm, abundance, soothing, fertility, good luck, and several other social and emotional states. Green tones give a real sense of peace and serenity, and that’s why by including a green shade, many people celebrate the calming effect.

Example Usage: Designs related to doctors’ offices and medical facilities. Brighter greens are most common for energizing designs, olive greens represent the natural world, and darker greens do a fantastic job to signal affluence and stability

Blue (primary)

Blue helps build productivity, trust, authority, peacefulness, and strength. Blue is a well-appreciated color. A significant number of people relate blue with integrity and reliability, making it a profound choice for sizeable corporate branding as well as a suave for mobile application icons and layouts.

Example Usage: Baby blue for young children’s products; light blues for calming and relaxing effects; bright blues for a refreshing feel; and dark blues for other areas where reliability and strength are needed.

Purple (secondary)
Purple is the color for enabling compassion and spiritual strength, which is formed as a result of adding red and blue together. It is also purposely used to create an aura of magical, mysterious, imaginative, luxurious, royalty, romance, wealth, and military honor.

Example Usage: light purples or mauve color for pampering, beauty, and romance; dark purples for luxury and wealth.

Neutrals
Neutral colors are incredibly vital for graphic design because they’re often presented as the backdrop and, thus, are expected to produce unique effects in coherence with the brighter accent colors. Among the colorful tones, they carry their own sophistication and meaningfulness.

White
White is used for expressing focus and minimalism. It orders the mind to declutter the unnecessary details and focus on a central object. It creates an acute sense of cleanliness, innocence, virginity, healthcare, purity, goodness, peace, and even bridal note.

Example Usage: Many news stations have white rooms for interviews. Designs that show-off products that are captured on a white background.

Black
The color ‘black,’ for which half of the world is crazy, can evoke both positive and negative emotions. It’s a very contextual color that emphasizes a variety of events such as elegance, simplicity, Halloween, power, respect, wealth, and formality.

Example Usage: Formal occasions.

Gray
Gray has a mixed reputation in the graphic designing realm. Hence, many people aren’t sure how to undertake it. It stays between black and white levels and can be interpreted as sleek and durable.

Example Usage: A dark grey hue is highly preferred for websites, and timeless brands such as Apple have utilized gray to set their iconic image throughout the next generations.

Final Thoughts

Color coding is a slice of the whole pie of graphic designing that needs to look appealing and expressive at the same time. To learn more handy details about the color composition and a multitude of different color theories, feel free to email us at hanna@hannalandisdesigns.com.

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Hanna Landis

Freelance Developer | Designer | Girl who knows Code | Coffee Lover | SAHM