Rethinking Color Theory

Ruxandra Duru is the co-creator of Color Moods, a tool for generating intentional color combinations. A longtime explorer of color theory, Ruxandra works with Google designers focusing on the intersection of color, emotion, and UX design. Here, she explains her tried-and-true method for composing color palettes with intention.

To even the most seasoned designers, color can remain mysterious and intimidating. If you feel that way, believe me, you are not alone.

After years of what we could call a color fixation, I’ve developed a three-step approach to color theory. My secret to making color more pleasurable and intentional — and much less scary — has to do with balancing, relating, and completing your colors.

But first, it is essential to be in touch with your (color) feelings and to broaden your understanding of color.

When I assess the success of a color scheme, I start by listening to the immediate feeling it generates.

If, in my gut, I feel joy, warmth, expansion, sweetness, calm: I’m on to something! Nostalgia, bittersweetness, and sadness can be even greater indicators, and are powerful emotions to elicit through color. Susan Cain’s book Bittersweet makes a good case for sad music and art, which can feel more heart-wreckingly beautiful to us than happy works. In his four-volume book The Nature of Order, architect and theorist Christopher Alexander focuses on beauty and aliveness in the built environment. The main emotion he hopes to evoke? Sadness.

My gut will also tell me when something is off. If I sense irritation, indifference, dislike, or contraction, that means: “keep adjusting.”

Basic color properties

Before going any further, let’s review some basic color properties. I know you’ve heard about these a million times, but let’s just do it one more time.

• Hue is what we usually refer to when we say “color.” It’s what allows us to differentiate blue from red, yellow from green. We typically organize hues around a color wheel, grouped by temperature, with warm on one side and cool on the other.
• Intensity, or chroma, refers to how close or distant a color is to its most vibrant or pure state. Intensity is similar but distinct from saturation, which refers to how much gray a color contains. A fully saturated color can have low intensity (yes!).
• Lightness, or value/tone, refers to how light or dark a color is. Colors in their pure state are perceived as having different lightness. Yellow is perceived as having a lightness close to white, while purple’s is closer to black. Of course, any hue can be made darker or lighter via the addition of white or black.

With a solid grasp of these properties, you can start to understand the range of possible colors, and have the vocabulary to describe them.

Seeing the breadth of color

I still remember the first time I looked through a book on the photographer Joel Meyerowitz. The book was focused on his pairs of black-and-white and color photographs, taken seconds apart. Looking at one, and then the other, I felt moved by the color photographs. The work showcased how color infuses everything. In subtle and more obvious ways, it adds an incomparable dimension of information and aliveness to how we perceive our world.

And yet, we often conceptualize color according to an artificial dichotomy.

On one end, there is “color” and the “colorful,” which generally means joyful color at maximal intensity. The question “what is your favorite color?” really asks “what is your favorite vivid color?” Faced with a crude number of bright hues, we become opinionated. “I love blue.” “I hate yellow!” Color becomes highly subjective and triggering.

On the other end, deemed by many as being more “sophisticated” and safe, we have the “non-colorful” black, white, grays, neutrals, and occasionally browns, which we can turn to in order to avoid offending anyone.

Color is infinitely more nuanced. Hues are more nuanced. Most importantly, there are many colors along the intensity spectrum, and few default names exist for those. So we call them “terra-cotta,” “butter,” or “sea blue.” These are useful colors. Colors that feel both colorful and comforting. Colors we have evolved to be surrounded by. In nature, with the exceptional pops of vivid color in fruits, flowers, and certain animals, most colors are far from being as vibrant as those on your typical RGB color wheel.

Approaching color using all its properties can help free us from this either/or situation and appreciate a more expansive range of color.

Understanding color is understanding color relationships

Countless books analyze color individually, by hue. It can be conceptually and intellectually interesting, but when it comes to working with color, I do not find it useful.

To really understand color, we need to look at the whole: at the subdued brown that’s lifting the blue and making it glow beautifully; at the off-white that both colors are sitting on, which makes them look deeper. Colors shine in combination, we just don’t always notice the more secondary characters.

The same color we find beautiful in one place might look dull or bothersome in a different context. Why? Because color is relative. Our visual system tries try to make neighboring colors more different:

• Hues are pushed apart
• Lightness is pushed apart
• Intensity is pushed apart

The effect is emphasized when one color surrounds another. To us, colors change depending on context. There is no such thing as a perfectly neutral backdrop; everything affects everything else.

That’s why it only makes sense to look at color in combination. The caveat is that this multiplies the complexity of working with color. Different color combinations create a range of moods and responses. Let’s learn how to work intentionally within that complexity.

Step 1: Balance the stimulation

Looking at color through the lens of stimulation can help systematize color's subjectivity and bring order to the dizzying number of possible color combinations. By considering the desired level of stimulation, ranging from calm to balanced to energizing, we can be more intentional about the effect a palette creates.

Additionally, this framework will help avoid sensations like apathy, irritation, or overwhelm, which tend to be tied to understimulation and overstimulation. So when thinking in terms of stimulation, it is generally best to avoid the extremes. There is plenty of room to play in the in-between!

I use our three color properties to roughly calculate stimulation. The higher the following values are, the higher the stimulation:

• Overall intensity
• Hue distance
• Light-dark contrast

You can play with intensity, hue distance, and contrast like sliders on a mixing board. Push them up to increase stimulation, down to reduce it. And think about balance: if one goes up, another can come down.

At an individual level, each slider will create different moods and effects:

• By reducing intensity via desaturation we can achieve that sober, nostalgic — even melancholic feeling. Pale saturated colors will be joyful and sweet. Dark saturated ones will appear hard and strong.
• Consider what hue distance is appropriate. As we will see in the next sections, close hues can feel gentle and harmonious yet rich, while distant and complementary hues can be activating and satisfying. Adjacently, increasing the number of distinct colors in a palette will also increase its stimulation.
• Light-dark contrast is a powerful, but often forgotten, tool — particularly when working with vibrant colors. A high light-dark contrast will give us a crisp, energizing (and legible) result. If it’s leaning too crisp, a moderate light-dark contrast will feel more pleasantly balanced. Hush it to a low level to introduce atmosphere and a soothing stillness where colors blend into each other. You might want to keep your overall intensity soft or use very close hues here, because placing vibrant, contrasting hues of the same lightness side by side will lead to vibration, which can feel unpleasantly overstimulating — an exception to the rule!

An additional note on the hard-to-grasp term atmosphere: Create it by combining soft light-dark contrast with gradients and fuzzy boundaries. Even vivid colors, in that context, will feel gentler on the eye.

Additional factors, like scale, affect stimulation. Larger surfaces will feel more stimulating than small ones. A tiny surface of highly vibrant colors or a whole wall covered with a blush of color can feel just right. Micro shifts of colors, such as on the surface of a rock or other natural elements, will provide an additional subtle stimulation that flat colors might lack.

Try the system at colormoods.co, which uses the three properties along with vibration to calculate stimulation.

Step 2: Relate

Colors work better together when they have something in common, or relate to each other in some way. This “glue” between the colors allows the palette to read as one, and in turn translates into beauty. When colors come from completely different worlds, the whole can feel disjointed and the colors discordant.

Here are a few methods of achieving relatedness, and thus harmony, by restricting one color property at a time. Again, different methods will achieve different effects:

Additional approaches include unifying colors by bathing them in an imaginary colored light. Picture how, under warm light, warm colors remain bright and cool colors look desaturated, and vice versa.

If you want to keep your colors intact, adding a bridge color between them can help tie them together. A bridge color can be any color that feels like a mixture of the parent colors, which generally means a more muted color located somewhere between the parent hues.

How much do we want colors to relate? The more ways they relate to each other, the more harmonious the result, but also the more expected. A healthy dose of variation and even dissonance can add an element of surprise and stimulation to the palette.

Step 3: Complete

There is a type of variation within a color scheme that is particularly satisfying. That’s when colors complete each other.

I’m talking about the widespread complementary approach to color and its derivatives. A child knows that blue balances orange and, in the process, both colors are emphasized.

In this high-contrast, hence high-stimulation context, it is more urgent to remember the “vibrant by default” bias, and consider all color properties. Our orange and blue need not be the most intense versions of themselves to generate deep satisfaction. Besides, this is not a logic restricted to the hue property. Think of how dark emphasizes and completes light.

The feeling of satisfaction is heightened when the proportions are dramatically different. When there is a lot of one thing, we yearn for something that counteracts and completes it. With just a touch of that balancing element, we feel relief. Just like there is nothing like the first gulp of fresh water on a hot day, a composition inundated with warm yellows will be balanced by even a pinch of cool color. Similarly, a touch of black will sharpen and balance an overall light scheme. Extra, extra satisfying!

Finally, completion is not only about pairs. If using more than two hues, one can pick them so that they roughly balance each other out on the color wheel. Colorist Donald Kaufman calls this “re-creating light.”

Conclusion

I hope this leaves you with a richer view of color and a few useful methods to work with it in all its spectrum and complexity. But don’t forget about emotion.

Artist Gerhard Richter would leave a finished painting on the wall and assess it freshly the next day. If after multiple days and multiple gut checks it stayed on the wall, it was a good one.

Wherever logic and rules take you, do another gut check and trust the spontaneous emotion it creates.

Additional color resources

• Interaction of Color by Josef Albers: the original color relativity manual.
• Chromorama by Riccardo Falcinelli: a complete coverage of color from the point of view of color theory, sociology, history, and science.
• The Elements of Color by Johannes Itten: another classic in synthesized form. It covers the different kinds of color contrasts including hue, lightness, and intensity contrast.
• Joyful by Ingrid Fetell Lee: particularly the chapters on pops of bright color. This is the book that inspired me to think in terms of stimulation. Don’t feel like reading? Here’s her Ted talk.
• Coolors app (on the phone): More than for generating palettes, I find it extremely useful to note colors and palettes that I see around me.
• “Two-Color Combinations: A Toolkit”: in-depth article on stimulation in two-color palettes. The origin of Color Moods!
• Colormoods.co: a labor of love showing stimulation at work in two-color palettes. Lock a color and play around with the stimulation for extra satisfaction.