 What's up guys, in today's lesson we're taking a look at colour theory for designers, why it's the most important thing you weren't taught in design school, how Isaac Newton invented the colour wheel and how you can use colour for good or bad. Let's go. This has been probably the most excited I've been about doing an episode. It's certainly been the most fun I've had when I've been doing some research. It's one of the most searched for things online. It's probably the most important thing I was never taught at design school. So today I'm going to show you some great resources. I'm going to put them all in the description. So you can learn colour theory, how you can use it in your own designs. It can be used to manipulate people. It can be used to persuade people. It can definitely be used for good or evil. Hopefully you'll be using it for good. I'm going to show you some great links. Let's start by kicking it off with this link. It's by Visually and it's a really popular thing on Pinterest. It's one of these infographics that I'll leave the link to in the description so you can see it. I'm just going to talk about the colour wheel first, where it came from and then we'll dive into what each colour means and what it's best suited for in your designs. Let's start off with taking a look at the colour wheel. A colour wheel is simply just a circle of colours. There's 12 main colours on there. You can see them breaking down here. They're all connected in a circle. This is the main way you'll see on all the design programmes on how to choose colours. We'll talk about a second where it actually comes from. What I was interested to find out when I was doing research was Isaac Newton actually invented the colour wheel. We all know he did some great work looking at colour through a prism and he was the first one to discover that white light could be split up into all these different colours and that infrareds off one side of the spectrum and then we know ultraviolet. We know visible light is just part of a massive light spectrum from physics. So all the visible light that we see goes from red to violet and what Isaac Newton did was he just took the red end and the violet end, curved it round and made it into a circle like this. So you can see on colour wheels red is always next to violet and all the other colours go around and that just was a really nice simple way of choosing colours. At the time there were a couple of different variations of different ways of like triangle method of how people choose colours but this was just the one that stuck. It was made by the great man himself and it's just something that stayed around for today. You can see other people have had goes of their own colour wheels but it's simple because it's just, I don't know, it's just easy. So let's just talk about primary colours for a second. So there are three primary colours and these are traditionally known as red, blue and yellow and the whole idea is that primary colours are colours that you come, that you mix to get every other colour in the colour wheel but one thing I actually discovered which is interesting is that in printers, so you have, you'll have heard of CMYK which is what we used in the print industry to make colours and that's actually cyan, magenta, yellow and black and I'll just show you that in a second. So these are these colours and actually these colours are true primary colours and these can be actually mixed to make red and other colours. So I know what you'll say is that but CMYK is what we use in print and on digital screens we have RGB which is red, green and blue and they make all the colours but the true primary colours are CMYK. That's what I've discovered. Let me know in the comments you'll probably disagree with me and say well we've been told in school that red, blue and green are. I'm not perfect but that's what I've, my understanding is so far of it but I find that really interesting and I also found out that our eyes have receptors. They have a green and a blue and a red receptor and those receptors to make other colours you mix them all together and you get all the other different colours so it's not just primary colours aren't just a thing that we've discovered it's a thing that actually in our eyes we have and then we have secondary and tertiary colours which are secondary colours are made up of mixing the primary colours and tertiary colours are made up of mixing it says here adjacent colours and then this colour wheel has you know in the middle we get closer we mix them all with black and on the outside we have a hue which is a pure colour not mixed with black. So that's just a quick overview of the colour wheel now into the more interesting stuff which is all the different colours in the wheel all the 12 colours and what they all mean psychologically which is a really interesting concept that we talk about in design that maybe is not talked about enough and we'll go through each one and we'll talk about how they use but you'll see it's subconsciously being used different different like banks might use blue and people will say oh it's calming but also has some other effects but let's take a look at the different colours and see what they actually mean to our brain. So let's start let's start with yellow and interestingly yellow is the colour that actually stands out most to the human eye so you'll see on a few of my new if they're still around thumbnails I have a yellow border and a lot of people have different colours but apparently the yellow eye stimulates I think it's both the green and the blue receptacles it's the only colour that does this in our eye and it makes it stand out the most so you'll know by looking at that yellow really stands out people who aren't colour blind but what it says here is it says yellows sparks energy creativity and then there's some like it's the happiest colour psychologically as well I don't think anyone can look yellow and feel sad although in different cultures this is a this is a bit different like you'll know red means look in China whereas it says here yellow actually signifies sadness in Greece and that maybe that's an anomaly around along cultures because normally or certainly in some way my Western culture you look at yellow and you think it's happy but it's just interesting to note that if you design in a website in some of these different countries like if I was designing a website in Greece now I probably wouldn't use yellow because I've just learned that I signified sadness or jealousy in France and it actually talks about in France here that doors of criminals were painted yellow in during the 12th century so it's just it's interesting to know when here we go 75% pencils in the US are painted yellow which is a which is interesting so I'd say use yellow for more bright websites a little bit of creativity I use it on mine to like stand out because people can see it but maybe just don't use it if you're in France or you're in Greece so I was reading through this earlier and I was preparing for this this presentation and something about green I found it really interesting they said green was the only solid colour flag ever used by a country so I was having a I was having a look for it before and actually you can see that it was the flag of Libya which it's been changed now but I think it was used from 1977 to 2011 and it was just a solid green colour which is just interesting because you see all these different colour different nations with different flags the US ones a great example it's got strong red and blue white a lot of them use primary colours whereas this is just a solid green colour I just I just thought that was interesting and so let's talk about a different things about green so green helps soothe and relax and you can see this because you'll see a lot of meditation apps use green you'll see a lot of them a lot of health people actually use green as well and apparently it's really good for it's just a common colour to look it's persuasive you'll see it used in a lot of not it's most common colour in the natural world you know it's produced by photosynthesis so if you're doing a natural nature website or a website for somewhere in the countryside green will probably be the colour that you use most and a couple of interesting things as it says here that green is used for night vision goggles because the human eye is the most sensitive to it and it can see the most different colours of that shade so that's really interesting so probably if I was doing you know we talk about monochrome in previous lessons and duo tone which is websites which are just made up of you know we've got white and black but then we've only got one or two single colours on there and with these colours you've got to be really careful which ones you use because because they're the only colours you have but greens interesting because you could you could do lots of different types of shades of green and that will give you a lot of depth in the website and interest so yeah so greens interesting for that it's on a side note I was reading this and I said green was the favourite colour George Washington and this is my little little claim to fame so it might not be true but my second name's convoy and that comes from Ireland and convoy is very similar to Conroy that they all come from the same clan in Ireland or family in the name's just got disassociated over time but apparently George Washington's mother was from the Conroy family who went over to America a few hundred years ago so very very distantly it might be rated the George Washington so that's just my my American claim to fame so let's take a look at blue so you'll see blue everywhere when I wait for Barclays blue is the main colour a lot of banks have blue a lot of you know it's talking about how it's calm and sedate it's just it's a primary colour as well and it's I think it's the most people's most favourite colour on a lot of them on a lot of statistical surveys so let's take a look so blue is the least gender specific colour have an equal appeal to both men and women that's interesting because you think of baby certainly in the Western culture baby boys have blue baby girls have pink but it's interesting to know that that it hasn't been tainted by that and it's equal to both men and women which is interesting ours are the only birds that can see in the colour blue so I don't know if a lot of people notice I'm really interested let me just show you I want to show you something which you'll find really interesting so I'm I'm interested in physics and I've I watched it on Neil deGrasse Tyson and and one of the really interesting things is the visible light spectrum so it is visible light you know that Newton discovered red to purple and you can actually see that this is just a tiny portion of all the light that's out there so you know you'll see these couple images with amazing space detail where the you'll see like these galaxies in different colours and they actually made by taking photographs in different wavelengths and combining them together so you'll know about x-ray x-ray machines how you can see through people but like did you know that like radio waves are actually a light wave that pass through the air it's how it gets to people so quickly and you know from microwaves in a microwave cooker they're actually created by the Sun they're actually light infrared which is how we get warm from the Sun on a cold day that's created that's a that's a form of light so check out this invisible light spectrum but I always wonder what it'd be like if we had a super natural ability to see in these different colours the world would appear completely differently like sometimes you look at these images where you know you'll see someone who's been in the Sun you'll see the damage by the UV and that's by taking a put in a filter in the camera in a different light and taking a look at it but I just wanted to show you that for a sec because I find that absolutely fascinating so this colour theory goes a lot broader than just the visible colours that we see but some animals can see in different colours which is why I think owls can like find mice in fields because they see the infrared on the mice which we can't see so we think they've got amazing this amazing clear vision but it's actually that they can just see in different types of light but yeah so use blue for things it says here it produce calming chemicals in the body so yeah you can see why banks use it it's trustworthy if you're a lawyer or something I'd probably use blue just you know it gives that calm cool feeling about it and it it's something that you should probably take a look at so let's go on to purple now purple's really interesting I was reading about this and it was saying so we know purple's associated especially in the UK with the royal family and that you know it says here it's about mystic and royal family it's my mum's favourite colour so I'm gonna talk about it for her but what I found was that purple used to be the most expensive colour to make which is why it's associated with royals because nobody could actually get it and I remember the royal family actually banned the royal family from wearing any other colour but purple but apparently it comes from comes from the Middle East and it comes it used to be made from snails so they crushed these type of mollusks up and that's where they'd get the purple die from so you can see here see the way this this one has the purple in it like such an interesting thing to discover but that's why it was so expensive because you can only find these snails in a certain type of the Middle East and then it had to be imported to the West and that's why purple now is associated with rich and it says here that it's like you'll notice on a lot of notes so I was doing some research and the 500 euro note is actually in a let's take a look at it now the 500 euro note is actually in purple so you'll see a lot of countries which have really high notes so if you design in a currency or something that talks about wealth maybe like an investor website think about using purple because that's historically what it's associated with and it says purple was the first was the colour of the first die made by a man that's really interesting and yeah it's the colour of Madison Square Garden seats and VIPs yeah so you can see anything that's expensive anything that says here calms the names of mine so it's similar to blue but it's just a more rich type of blue I guess so join a separate comics those are purple covers sold better that's really interesting so if you're gonna do a cover like I know when I was working in vogue magazine covers are really important because they showcase the magazine and sell it and one of the things was the green covers never worked so you'll never see a vogue magazine with green on the cover so it's interesting to know that purple was the colour and you'll see superheroes are associated with purple and maybe that's literally just because it's sold the best so it's interesting to check out purple and let's talk about pink next so pinks you know it's associated with girls it's a new full fun and then you know I've actually seen pink in in more recent years you know I've seen football boots and pink rusty on a Ronaldo or some it really stands out it's pinks used in prisons holding cells to reduce erratic behavior so it seems to it seems to calm people down and it gives em energy action and confidence so maybe if you're doing like more of a fashion website I've seen a lot of yoga websites done and in pink pastries taste better when they come out the box pink yeah yeah so you'll see a lot of sweets in pink so maybe if you're doing more of a fun website more of a like a candy company or something something like that what's serious since the color pink is said to have a tranquilizer effects sports teams sometimes use pink and paint the locker room of the opposing teams yeah so I can imagine that imagine you come into a I'm a huge Liverpool fan so imagine you come into one field in your opposing room and suddenly all this pinks around you just you can't get angry can you know they say reds like they'll talk about red next but that's like the passion color whereas pink it just calms you down so that's like probably a really good idea for sports teams and you can see how like my understanding of color theory you can actually manipulate people's behavior or make them do something so I could imagine using it in prisons or places where people need to calm down painted that color let's move on to red so we all know red is a red red the color of passion but that's actually because red like this is interesting red actually has a lot of energy like physically the light spectrum so in physics eat eat from red to blue each color has a it's like a wavelength so you'll see a wave and actually the color of the wavelength of red is a is is different than the wavelength of blue which is why which is why drawn up as it ends and red is actually to them it's got the longest wavelength so it's interesting because even though people says it energizes it's actually got the least energy out of all the particles which you wouldn't believe the first but that's just something interesting to note and then once you get past red you get into the infrared spectrum which is used a lot for night vision and you know there are a lot of heaters nowadays we've got them in our house which just produce infrared light which is invisible but actually warms your skin and it's how the sun warms so maybe that's why it's associated with warming but it says red draws attention and keeps the user and it keeps the focus so red you'll see on websites used a lot and normally for errors and danger it it just seems to be it makes people act on a website so we're saying encourages action and confidence so it draws people to attention you know we see it used in just kind of anywhere where people's attention needs to be drawn so red is the first color you lose sight or twilight so you lose red and bees can't see in the color red so they don't pollinate red flowers another interesting fact about red other than using it for like high-energy things is the reason the sunset is red is because we have particles in the sky and those particles are just the right size to scatter blue light which is why the sky is blue but at night it has to the sun has to travel through more atmosphere to get to us because it's on an angle there's more atmosphere and then the red particles are allowed to come through which is why we see a red sunset but on Mars the sky is red during the day because of the particle size but at night time they actually have a blue sunset because of where the the sun then goes down has the opposite effect on earth so really interesting let's talk about orange so orange is my favorite color I used to do by CV and orange not many people use it my favorite magazine color ever was an orange so I want to show you this I've probably showed you this before on a different website so wired web is dead at issue if you've ever got a chance to pick it up so I used to work in wired and we used to get all three magazines from the US and this was an American version and the color doesn't really do it justness but this episode was my favorite just because it stood out it was like a fluorescent orange and it was a really beautiful color to use but apparently you know orange is another apparently it's another energetic color so apparently it's the most controversial one of others and it has the most say this is as love or hate so it kind of like Marmite but I haven't really seen orange used for many many things yeah this is right orange is used for I've seen safety news like people wear orange hats when they need to be visible so maybe if you design the website for like a warehouse or safety orange seems to be used there what orange means high in the color coded threat system yeah so not much not much going on about orange you don't really see orange cars you don't really see many things about orange I love it but maybe won't use it for my stuff again considering a lot of people don't like it it's an interesting color to use orange and then we have white so white as you know talked about Isaac Newton he split the white up into all the different colors white is actually a combination of all colors white is the most important color you'll use as a designer a lot of people then appreciate it white space I like to let my designs breathe I like full-screen menus which just have black text in them you'll see a lot of the thumbnails for my images is white background with text I probably wouldn't put an image in there but I found that through looking at statistics that the images perform better but personally I just like really crisp white with text you're seeing some my early videos that's that's all I had and just you know allowing that white space having the confidence to use that white space and not having to fill up every single pixel on your design is really important and you see is talked about purity and cleanliness so as a design it's really important and also it's used in medical a lot so you see doctors wearing white coats maybe if you design like a medical website allow maybe use a few more grays bring it in allow that white space to settle in and maybe use it more in your images as well as as well as in the thing so this is interesting so says according to him according to Panta and white is the best selling color for American t-shirts yeah I think it's just because it's neutral and people like it and you know you'll go a home and you'll buy paint and it says more shades of white are available commercially in turn of a color so you know when you're buying paint you'll see all these different colors of white to paint your walls and Magnolia all these other ones so even though white is pure there's certainly a lot of shades of if you to use and then we just talk about gray and black so grays actually probably the most popular color in the UK at the moment we went to buy carpets recently and there's just gray everywhere so what to say about gray so gray is the color of intellect knowledge and wisdom yeah you can imagine if people have gray hairs they grow old that's probably where that comes from so maybe if you were doing a website about I don't know about accompanying that had like a lot of experience and wisdom you could use gray it's the human eye can distinguish what 500 shades of gray so that's interesting yeah so 50 shades of gray not fine I mean 500 shades of gray you can use different shades of it on your website it's it's a color I don't use that much I'm not really a fan of gray I like I like vibrant colors you'll see by a lot of shirts I'm wearing I don't use that much gray but if you're into it and you've got you want some sort of maybe you design a website for a person who's formal or is a representative in government something like that something that you know to go over experience use gray and then and then black so black is the color of them white so blacks you know it could be like a pessimistic color it could be like a you know it could it could be used for all sorts of things so we've seen the dark mode UI come in in the last couple in the last couple of months so black is sailing the incolor and web design we've got black backgrounds white text it's actually easier on your eyes than having a white background and white text it's OLED screens when they display blind and display black the colors the displays actually switched off so it's interesting to save battery it's interesting all the new devices are going to have OLED screens so the watches that's how you get such a long life shelf life on them you only display a few pixels and your battery last for ages I can see this being on phones and loads of different devices going forward so dark mode is a UI style it's probably the one that's followed flat UI although you can have flat UI certainly in it but it's one that's followed for not just style but also substance you know it's it saves your eyes it saves battery developers use it because we're on computers for 11 hours a day it's a it's one of those things that you should probably use and then use your other colors to bring into it to have a really stylish website guys I hope you enjoyed that lesson let me know in the comments below what your favorite color is think about subscribing to the YouTube channel I'm going to put out lots more content check out school that Anthony come by calm I'm going to be putting out lots of exclusive content on there until next time keep designing