Quick Tricks to Create Graphic Design Color Schemes

Abhinav Girdhar
By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on December 18th, 2024 7:45 am | 5-min read

As a graphic designer, you need to keep in mind the various essential elements when creating a piece. You have different textures and patterns to choose from. You need to find the perfect theme that not only suits your design and but also goes with your brand. To make your piece more effective and expressive, you choose to add different images and fonts to it. This helps you convey the clearer message to your audience from your brand.

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There is one more thing that proves to be as critical as others – Color. Color in graphic design is one of the trickier concepts to master. Various designers feel overwhelmed thinking about color theories, hues, shades, tints, color wheel, color psychology, tones, saturation, and much more. However, you need not panic if you are starting to use colors in your graphic design piece. Just go through these tricks and you can simply make your design look nice.

Best Color Inspiration Tricks - Appy Pie

Common Color Tricks from Designers

Here are a few common color design tricks that you can use to create excellent graphic design pieces.

  1. Begin with Personal Preferences

    2. When you start designing a graphic design piece, you must know what your client wants and what your target audience expects. Start with client preferences first. Try to use colors that they like and avoid using the ones they don’t. Color preferences change based on gender, age, choices, behavior, and much more. For example, both men and women like green and blue but women prefer purple, and men prefer black.

  2. Know Your Audience

    3. Colors represent many emotions. You must know your audience before you make the color choices. Keeping in mind the expectations of your target audience, you must understand how you need to look at the colors you are about to choose. The requirement could be to look energetic and bold, open and friendly, or quiet and confident. Know the power of colors before you go for them.

  3. Use the Color Wheel

    4. When it comes to finding the right color combination, the color wheel is the best tool that you can go for. By learning how to use a color wheel, you can make your colors match and create the best graphic design color palettes to help your designs stand out. There are four kinds of design color schemes that you can create with the color wheel – monochromatic, complementary, analogous, and triadic.

    Go through this post to learn how you can create a perfect graphic design color palette for your business using the color wheel tool - How to Create a Color Palette for Your Business?

    And, let me now introduce you with the Appy Pie’s Color Wheel. You can use to create the best color palettes with your preferred color combinations.

    Create Designs with The Colors You Choose

  4. Apply Color Psychology

    5. To apply the color psychology into your designs, you first need to learn how color psychology works. As we all know, and various famous designers have proven that colors affect us both psychologically and physiologically. Researchers and designers use colors to affect the mood in different ways. For example, various restaurants use a red color scheme as red makes people feel hungry. In the same way, Purple suggests elegance, Blue makes you feel cold, Green suggests wealth, and much more. So, try to apply colors that help you attract your target audience.

  5. Avoid Overdoing It

    6. Even if your client tells you to use as many colors, don’t do it! So many colors in one piece can just make it look messy and uncoordinated. You can try it out on a sample website page, use 10-12 colors and you will find people leaving the page right away without even looking at your content. You can use three or fewer colors to make it better. Pick a main color or two to highlight the page, use the other two to compliment the base color for design. When using multiple colors, make sure they don’t overpower or clash with each other.

    Watch this video to learn how you can choose your website color palette design.

    (Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.)

  6. Match Colors to the Brand

    7. Even if you are excited to create a breathtaking color combination, keeping in mind the branding could limit your choice. Try to make the best use of your brand colors when designing a piece for your business. You can’t use different colors for your logo and your marketing materials. This will confuse your audience about what you actually represent.

    And, if you haven’t yet selected your brand color, you can choose the unexpected color combinations and come up with a memorable design for your audience.

    Go through this step-by-step guide and learn how to design a logo for your brand – How to design a logo? And, use Appy Pie’s Logo Maker to design an ultimate logo.

    Design My Logo

  7. Go with the Industry

    8. Make sure you use the color that belongs to your industry. This helps you attract the target audience. There are no hard-and-fast rules that you need to follow, it’s just some colors go very well with a few industries. For example, blue represents service, green represents medical, and warm colors like maroon, beige, and orange represent organic food. Just like various technology firms and healthcare providers use blue and real estate people use brown, orange, etc.

  8. Play with Shades

    9. You have created a color palette design and still find something missing, what would you do? You can try adding a few more tints or shades and check if it feels complete. You can achieve shades by adding black color to your base color. And tints, on the other hand, can be created by adding white to the main color. The tints are lighter than the shades. The best part about adding shades or tints is that your base color stays the same and you get the variety while not losing the consistency.

  9. Use the Right Tools

    10. If you have the right tools, creating attractive color combinations becomes easier. Although there are a lot of free tools available online to help you create expressive designs using the right color schemes, here is the one that I would recommend – Appy Pie Design. Appy Pie Design helps you create excellent graphic design pieces with great color combinations and templates. It has a responsive interface and easy-to-use features that you can use to get the best out of what you have in your mind.

    Get Started

    Here is a post that you can go through to learn more about what graphic design is and how you can create engaging graphic design pieces - An Introduction to Graphic Design: What is Graphic Design.

Conclusion

Try using these color tricks to create excellent graphic design pieces for your business. Use Appy Pie’s design tool to add more meaning to them. Also, ask your users for the feedback to help improve your future design pieces.

Let us know in the comments if you know some more design tricks that we can add. Good Luck!

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Abhinav Girdhar

Founder and CEO of Appy Pie

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