This week, we covered the topic of colour and colour theory. This topic allowed me to understand and cover the history of the colour wheel and how it is used within the world of Digital Design as well as what ways colour can be represented in the world such as culture, materials, colour contrast and the legibility of it. The colour wheel includes:
After reviewing the content about the colour wheel, I looked at how legibility and readability is used within colour and typography, allowing myself to understand for example how a background colour can interfere with the readability of some text as well as the spacing of text too. I was able to demonstrate and practice this by using a website called colourcontrast.cc, which let me check and see what colours worked best with certain text and what didn’t.
After reviewing Today’s topic of colour theory, I was given the chance to trial and exercise in class, which would allow me to experiment and have a go at working with different colour combinations about colour contrast and ensuring it fits the criteria of readability and legibility. I began by creating a basic wireframe, which I have previously done before in last week’s class and began importing and building my frames to support the three colour combinations I’ll be working with.
Once I had built my three wireframes I was now able to start experimenting with various colours, and to do so, I went ahead and used another website called adobecolour.com which I found to be very helpful as it had a wide range of colours to choose from, all about the three stages of the colour wheel that I had gone over earlier in class. As soon as I had found the colours I wanted to use for each of my wireframes, I went back again to use the website colourcontrast.com to ensure that the colours I was going to use would be suitable amongst the text I had on each frame too. So this led to me taking some time to adjust each colour so that it was just right.
As got towards finishing my exercise, I was suggested by my lecturer David, that I should use a plug-in within Figma called Colour contrast, which would support and allow me to see if the colours amongst the test was suitable and accessible for someone to view especially if they were faced with colour blind etc. So using this tool I found it to be very helpful and it allowed me to understand more clearly on how colour should be demonstrated and thought about within design.
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Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this weeks topic as previously I wasn’t too experienced or had much knowledge on how to use colour in this way despite studying art at school, so it helped me improve on my current skills and how to use colour theory within each of current and future design projects during my course.
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