COLOUR: THINK IN RELATIONSHIPS

Colour becomes much easier when you stop memorising individual shades and start thinking in three dimensions:

HUE

What colour family is it?

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and everything between them.

VALUE

How light or dark is it?

A pale blue and midnight blue may share a hue family, but visually they behave very differently because their values are different.

SATURATION

How intense or muted is the colour?

A vivid cobalt blue has high saturation.

A smoky grey-blue has lower saturation.

This creates a simple formula:

COLOUR = HUE + VALUE + SATURATION

Whenever a colour feels wrong, diagnose which variable is wrong.

Maybe the hue is correct but too saturated.

Maybe the saturation is beautiful but the value is too dark.

Maybe the colour itself works, but its relationship with the surrounding colours does not.

Professional colour selection is therefore less about asking:

“Is this a beautiful colour?”

and more about asking:

“What happens to this colour when I place it next to everything else?”