Website color

Once I made full effort to design a set of eye-catching color combinations for my website? Or why do the websites of banks, company numbers, or financial institutions always use blue lines? So you have come to the right place. Although most website developers know the color disks used by the network and the 16-digit system for computing colors, the principle behind the colorics and effective color combinations is still ignorant.

Color itself has been a hard nut to crack for centuries. For example, Socrates once assumed that the source of "fire" was the color produced by the combination of the eyes with the whiteness of the object. Afterwards, Newton explored the relationship between light and color. After many scientific studies, he finally confirmed the absolute relationship between light waves and color sensing in the 20th century.

Today, research information on color reconciliation and tonality directly affects artists, designers, and advertising AE personnel. This guide on color theory aims to explore how to use color effectively on websites. It also provides many color blending techniques that allow you to use color to control website design.

Colorology

We can see that colors interact with each other by three elements: light sources, reflection properties of objects, and how the human retina and brain visual cortex process light waves. No matter which media material we use for our work-painting, printing, or networking-we have to rely on the above process to use colors effectively.

Color arrangement-Rainbow

At the end of the 17th century, Newton proved that color does not exist in the object itself, but is the result of the action of light. As long as we combine the long and short optical waves on the visual spectrum, we can form a white light. The wavelengths of these visible light correspond to seven different colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, ingoing, and purple.

The visible spectrum isolated by Newton in the experiment is actually a small part of all the electromagnetic spectra. The whole spectral range is divided into short frequency and long wave areas (such as radio frequency modulation) to high-frequency and short-wave areas (for example, X-ray ). The area of the visible spectrum is between infrared and ultraviolet, and the wavelength is about 400nm (purple) to 700nm (red. Although Newton proved that these light waves are combined to form white light, they only need red, green, and blue light waves to generate white light.

Light absorption and reflection

When a light wave is projected on an object, it transmits, absorbs, or reflects light waves of different parts. Depending on the characteristics of different objects and their atomic structures, it may reflect green light but absorb other wavelengths. At this time, people's retina and brain visual cortex will process this reflected light and then form the color we see.

When artists and designers copy colors to a canvas or paper, they simulate this process by absorbing light waves from a part of the paint and reflecting other light waves. For example, to generate green colors, we can use pigments that absorb red and blue waves. This process is the basis of the color pattern of all painting and printed media.

Everything depends on the eyes

Of course, whether reflected from an object or emitted from a light source itself, our ability to handle light waves depends on the visual cortex of the retina and brain. There are three receivers (or cone cells) in the retina that respond to certain frequencies of light waves. Red cone cells can induce low-frequency wavelengths, while green cone cells respond to medium-frequency wavelengths, while blue cone cells respond to high-frequency wavelengths. The operations of these cone cells are not binary, but similar to channels, which can send stimuli to the visual cortex of the brain separately. After processing, they produce the colors we see.

In order to produce a specific color, artists/designers must increase or decrease the intensity of light waves, so that visual receivers in the body only reflect certain light waves. As for the principle of addition or subtraction, it depends on the material you use to express your work.
There are usually two ways for the designer to deal with colors: 1. Add the color method to mix light waves of different colors to form white light; 2. Use paint to reduce light waves. The color plate and CMYK system used by traditional artists are both in the color reduction mode. On the website, we are faced with the projection of light, rather than the light reflected from the object. Therefore, we use the coloring method, which we call RGB.

Coloring method

In nature, we see light waves that pass through the object reflection into our retina, but not only produce color in this way. For example, a stage lamp uses white light to pass through a colored filter to produce different colors. The computer screen also uses the method of ray-casting, but the difference is that it produces light by letting the electronic light gun emit light to the screen containing phosphorus. These electronic light guns can emit three colors: red, green, and blue. With these three colors, the computer screen can produce a complete spectrum. This is a well-known RGB color system.

In the RGB system, designers can also build a spectrum by mixing the three primary colors. If two primary colors are mixed, three primary colors are generated: Green, foreign red, and yellow. As mentioned above, adding the three primary colors of light together can make white light. Therefore, if an RGB value is 255,255,255, it is white. If the light of the three primary colors (RGB: 0, 0) is completely removed, black is generated.