Corporate Color

How do you choose a color scheme? First, you have to ask yourself (or a client) what message they are trying to convey. Are you trying to get attention? Are you trying to agitate? Are you trying to be harmonious? There are many questions to ask prior to picking a color scheme no matter what domain you are addressing.

After you have asked and answered these questions, you may choose to experiment with different hues, values, and intensities to achieve the affect you are seeking. For example, if you are trying to agitate an audience, you may wish to use the complementary colors of red and green. When placed next to each other, these two colors interact visually to create an almost vibrational quality. If, on the other hand, you want to created a sense of calm, an analogous color scheme is the blue/green range may prove effective.

The key to a successful application of color is thought, experimentation, and research. Research your target audience's likes, dislikes, and trends.

I found some information from another source that I thought was useful and would like to share.

COLOR TERMS THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW & UTILIZE

Every color available to us without any varition are called natural hues. Each of these natural hues can have a variation in tint, shade, or tone. The way that these variations come about are by combining natural hues with black, white, and all the grays in between. Even though many of you probably use the following terms on a regular basis, some of you might not know exactly what they mean or how they can help you in your website design.

HUE:

A hue is a pure color with no black or white added. A hue is the feature of a color that allows it to be identified as the color that it is, for example red, blue, yellow, green, purple, etc.

PURE HUE (NATURAL HUE):

A pure hue is the base color at its full intensity level, in other words, no shading, tinting, or tones have been added to the color yet.

SHADES:

Shades are the relative darkness of a color. You create a shade of a color by darkening the pure hue with black.

TINTS:

Tints are the relative lightness of a color. You create a tint of a color by lightening the pure hue with white.

INTENSITY (Also Known as SATURATION or CHROMATICITY)

Intensity describes the identifiable hue component of a color. A blue with RGB numbers Red - 0, Green - 255, and Blue - 0 (0,255,0) is considered 100% saturated and is intense, high in chromaticity, and completely saturated. A gray color has no hue and is considered achromatic with 0% saturation.

In the picture above, the colors are at 100% saturation
at the circle’s edges and get less intense (saturated) as
the colors get closer to the center of the circle.

TONE:

A tone is a hue that has had grey added to it. A tone can also be a hue with a large percentage of its complementary color added.

VALUE / LUMINANCE:

Basically, value is a a measurement of how close to black or white a given color is. In other words, value is a measurement of how much light is being reflected from a hue. Those hues with a high content of white have a higher luminance or value. If you look at the color wheel below, you will see that this whell is full of different color values. The outer band is the natural hue meaning that it is the original color. The 2nd band is a tint of the original hue and has a higher content of white or luminance than the original hue. The inner bands are shaded versions of the natural hue and are closer to black than the original hue.

AN EXAMPLE OF OUR COLOR THEORY PUT INTO USE: