Color fundamentals

In the last chapter we talked about harmony in patterns. We covered ingredients like shape and size, but color may be the most consequential. That’s why we are dedicating two whole chapters to it. While the focus is on patterns, a lot of it applies to design more broadly.

Color is a key ingredient of any pattern. It already sets the mood while the viewer is making out the shapes, and it's also the ingredient you can control most easily: by the source images you create, pick, or adjust before you load them into Repper. Color theory and application go deep and you can spend a lifetime on them (like any famous painter can tell you!). We will cover it in two digestible chapters: this one covers the fundamentals, the next one translates them to patterns and how to work them in Repper.

We’ll be weaving in parts from a video on color theory we made a few years ago. Michel introduces what we’ll cover cover:

Soothing, energetic, classic, sinister, dreamy. A lot of that comes down to the color palette. Here's the first part of the video, on what colors do to us and where those associations come from.

Just how much work the palette can do on its own became clear to me when we made Christmas patterns without a single Christmas element in them. No Santa, no snowflakes, and still, a strong sense of winter and juletide:

Beyond seasonal moods, a palette can carry a story. When we interviewed textile designer Becka Rahn, she described a student project where she limited everyone to the red, pink, pale blue and green of traditional Ukrainian embroidery. The work was wildly varied, and still hung together as one exhibition, because the color story carried over.

Before we can talk about how colors come together in harmonies, we need a way to describe individual ones. We’ll look at the color wheel of hues, saturation and brightness to create any color. You probably know these terms, but if you’re a bit unsure, watch this short video:

In summary:

Every color you see on screen can be pinned down with those three. Navy and sky blue share a hue and differ in brightness. A dusty rose and a hot pink share a hue and differ in saturation. Once you have this vocabulary, "I don't like that green" becomes "that green is too saturated in this context", which is something you can act on.

Now for the part most people mean when they say "color theory": harmonies. The recipes that make colors work well together. In this video, we cover the 7 most used color harmonies. If you haven't heard of these before before, get ready for a whole new way of looking and working with colors!

The video mentions a cheat sheet with all seven harmonies. Here you can download the PDF. Print it out and keep it close, maybe even hang it up? It's a great reference!

Just like rhythm and overall harmony, color harmony isn't a strict science. It’s a tool for designing and thinking about visuals. The pattern below is a good example: if you treat the white/beige as neutral, you may notice there are really just 3 colors in different shades: purple, subdued green and warm yellow.

And what is the pattern below? Is it monochrome with a little color highlight, or is it a complementary harmony strongly weighted towards one color? Either explanation has something going for it :)

One more thing before we move on, and it's a fun one. Colors are not as stable as they seem. The same color looks different depending on what surrounds it, and the video has two examples that fooled me the first time

The lesson here is that a color is never just itself, it's itself plus its context. And in a pattern every color has neighbors on all sides, repeated over the whole surface. What that does to a design is exactly where the next chapter begins.