The Designer's Guide to Color Theory, Color Wheels, and Color Schemes

 When you're sifting through your News Feed, what tends to catch your attention? More likely than not, it's YouTube videos, pictures, animated GIFs, and other visual content, right?

While text-based content is always important when seeking answers to a question, creating visuals such as infographics, charts, graphs, animated GIFs, and other shareable images can do wonders for catching your readers' attention and enhancing your article or report.

I know what you might be thinking: "I don't know how to design awesome visuals. I'm not creative."

Hi. I'm Bethany, and I will be the first to tell you that I'm not naturally artistic. And yet, I found a strength in data visualization at HubSpot, where I've spent most of my days creating infographics and other visuals for blog posts.

So, while I wouldn't say I'm naturally artistic, I have learned how to create compelling visual content. So can you.

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And you can do this by learning color theory. Consider this your introductory course, and we'll be covering the following topics: 

What Is Color Theory?

Color theory is the basis for the primary rules and guidelines that surround color and its use in creating aesthetically pleasing visuals. By understanding color theory basics, you can begin to parse the logical structure of color for yourself to create and use color palettes more strategically. The result means evoking a particular emotion, vibe, or aesthetic.

Why Is Color Theory Important in Web Design?

Color is an important aspect, if not the most important aspect of design, and can influence the meaning of text, how users move around a particular layout, and what they feel as they do so. By understanding color theory, you can be more intentional in creating visuals that make an impact.

While there are many tools out there to help even the most inartistic of us to create compelling visuals, graphic design tasks require a little more background knowledge on design principles.

Take picking the right colors, for instance. It's something that might seem easy at first, but when you're staring down a color wheel, you're going to wish you had some information on what you're looking at.

Read on to learn about the terms, tools, and tips you should know to pick the best colors for your designs.

Color Theory 101

Let's first go back to high school art class to discuss the basics of color.

Remember hearing about primary, secondary, and tertiary colors? They're pretty important if you want to understand, well, everything else about color.

Primary Colors

Primary colors are those you can't create by combining two or more other colors together. They're a lot like prime numbers, which can't be created by multiplying two other numbers together.

There are three primary colors:

• Red
• Yellow
• Blue

Think of primary colors as your parent colors, anchoring your design in a general color scheme. Any one or combination of these colors can give your brand guardrails when you move to explore other shades, tones, and tints (we'll talk about those in just a minute).

When designing or even painting with primary colors, don't feel restricted to just the three primary colors listed above. Orange isn't a primary color, for example, but brands can certainly use orange as their dominant color (as we at HubSpot know this quite well).

Knowing which primary colors create orange is your ticket to identifying colors that might go well with orange -- given the right shade, tone, or tint. This brings us to our next type of color ...