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Is Red the Fairest One of them All?
Featured Author:
Igor Asselbergs
Igor Asselbergs started out as illustrator. He co-founded Tricolore, a color design consultancy in Amsterdam. Currently he is CEO of Colorjinn, a software company specialized in applications for color visualization. Igor is guest lecturer at a design college, a consultant for the paint industry, and has his own color blog, Livelygrey. http://livelygrey.com
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Igor Asselbergs
Red is usually regarded as a color which visually leaps out. Red stand out. Red jumps off the page. But does it really?
I found two interesting pictures on Flickr. Both contain a red button.
The one button is highly visable, the other is almost hidden in its surroundings, even while it takes up a large part of the picture.
How come the one button stands out a lot more than the other?
It’s not because the button is red.
It’s because the background is NOT red. From a design perspective, that’s a pretty important distinction…
Once again it’s not about the colors, it’s about how the colors relate to one another.
TOEEHOEE
about 1 year ago
66 comments
when I was in an interer design class -- a test question was how can you down play a large red sofa -- the answer was place it next to a red wall ----
JoshuaSteele
about 1 year ago
446 comments
very true
FrancisBig
about 1 year ago
486 comments
Thanks for the tip
dmwingon
about 1 year ago
6 comments
One of the most interesting things that was covered in the color theory section of my 2-D Design class last semester was how colors relate to each other and change depending on what other colors are around them. We dealt with what happens to colors when you place a similar tone behind them, as opposed to a neutral tone, or its complement. It was a really thought-provoking part of the class; we did experimental things with paint chips and layering colors to take note of the effects.