When you see a color piece—like this website or a magazine or even a print ad—do you understand the meaning that goes into the color?

If you’ve had experience in print, you might know that all pieces are made up of CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (K) and on screen they are made up of RGB, red, green, blue.

Those basics provide the building blocks of color in our surrounding world. But there’s more to color theory than that; for guidance you have to go back to the color wheel.

For that, there are three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue. All colors on the color wheel are derivations of those, and all those colors have certain relationships that drive what we think and how we perceive the world around us.

What do you understand about color at work in your world? This graphic below can help.

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Intro to Graphic Design: Color Theory Class

See here for a great introductory course on color theory (just $0.99).

And see here for more free free design basics!

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Thanks to Quill for the color theory infographic.