Color Rule: Establish an Ambiance

The intensity, brightness, and schematic combinations of colors affect the way people will feel about and interact with your information. When you appropriately match the color of your document to the intended ambiance of your message, people will be far more likely to react to it in the way you intend. Recognize if your message is meant to be calm, happy, energetic, conservative, elegant, or anything else and work to match your color ambiance with that mood.

Lights & Pales

Light colors are pale, tinted hues (meaning white has been added to them) so soft that they can feel almost transparent. Lights are great for creating stark contrast with dark colors, giving accents to your designs, or being used as background colors. Use lights and pastels to create soothing messages and calm ambiances. Lights and pastels are common colors for weddings, babies, religious ceremonies, and related events and are often considered feminine, but these don’t have to be the only uses for lights and pastels.

Brights

Brights colors are fully saturated hues that have not been tinted or shaded with black or white. They are loud, attention-grabbing colors that provide ambiances of engery, happiness, and excitement. Brights are common for comics and superheroes, fast food logos, and children. Be cautious with brights, though. Too many bright colors together can be hard on the eyes and they can have a tendency to clash with other colors.

Darks

Dark colors are shaded with black and create more serious undertones. Darks can sometimes be accented well with lights, creating a blended ambiance of serious and fun. Darks are often used to create moods of professionalism, efficiency, quality, sadness, and consistency.

Warms

Warm colors fall on the color wheel between yellow and violet-red and include colors like orange, magenta, salmon, pink, maroon, and red. Use warm colors to create energy to a design and promote new ideas or products. Warm colors generally make people feel happy and enthusiastic.

Cools

Cool colors fall on the color wheel between yellow-green and violet and include colors like teal, sea green, navy, lavendar, and sage. Use cool colors to build trust (particularly with research), or to communicate professionalism, conservativeness, health, science, and technology.

Neutrals

Neutrals are genearlly soft, not real noticeable colors that include grays and browns. Neutrals provide information with soft undertones that allow for accents and sublte orientation towards content. Use neutrals to keep designs warm and calm or to provide occasional opportunities for strong accents and emphases.