Color Research

The Book

Specially made for fashion designers
28 pages of fashion and textile information
400 figure templates for fast sketching
1 inner pocket for storing swatches

Feb 7, 2010

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Color is one of the most important design element and every seasons, companies pay a huge amount of money try to invent new color or to stay with the color trend. And in this post, we explore some more about color, like generators, or color research tool.

Color Wheel

To understand color, you need to under the color wheel first

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In the color wheel, we have 2 formula formed:

Analogous colors – any three colors which are side by side on a 12 part color wheel, such as yellow-green, yellow, and yellow-orange. Usually one of the three colors predominates.

Complementary colors – any two colors which are directly opposite each other, such as red and green and red-purple and yellow-green. In the illustration above, there are several variations of yellow-green in the leaves and several variations of red-purple in the orchid. These opposing colors create maximum contrast and maximum stability.

Color Mode (Spot color, RGB, CMYK……)

This is one of the technical terms that many fashion designers get confused.

For simplification, we can classify the color into 2 categories: Screen and Pigment

For screen, a very wide range of color can be displayed

RGB
CMYK(generated, not 100% exactly with the real pigment)
Spot Color(generated, not 100% exactly with the real pigment)
HSV
Lab Color

Still, the screen can’t be display some kind of color, like florescence and luminous color

For pigment, we have

Spot color, which is formed by mixing different chemical (PANTONE or some other color palette)
CMYK, very common in normal color-printed, mixing Cyan, magenta, yellow and black by dots to form different color

So, we normally use RGB color mode when displaying on the screen, and CYMK, spot color for printout, and spot color for textile.