94
According to Joe Scout the first company to use CMYK in printing was Eagle Printing Ink Company and the year was 1906. It was not until 1956 that it became a standard as a result of Pantone trying to streamline the workflow.[1]
This however does not really answer who really invented/discovered the choice of colors, the first scientific literature to ...
54
Change the client's mind.
There is nothing that can fix the fact that red text on a blue background is an extremely poor choice for legibility because the contrast is too low, and because specifically red and blue work poorly as contrasting colours.
This website webaim.org shows that the contrast between your two colours is a pitiful 1.52:1
Contrast is ...
47
I made this little CSS3/AngularJS tool for a project to generate Material Colors palettes. You can enter your 500 hex color and use an external tool like ColorZilla to get the color values from there. Also the lighter ones are exactly the ones Google used, but the darker ones are off by a little.
mcg.mbitson.com
45
CMYK is an improvement over CMY which itself is improvement over RYB model, which has been used for centuries (if not millennia).
It's really hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, especially as some use words "red" and "blue" in more general sense. Eg. George Field's chart from 1841 lists "red, blue, yellow" but his red in our eyes looks closer ...
35
The main difference between the initial example and your experiments is that the original does not cover nearly as drastic a change in hue.
Going from golden-yellow to magenta/pink is about a 1/6 turn on the colour wheel. In contrast, your experiments (orange-red to blue-violet, blue-violet to yellow-green, and cyan to blue-violet) are all more than 1/4 ...
34
Edward H Adelson created a Checker shadow illusion in 1995.
From wikipedia:
The checker shadow illusion is an optical illusion published by Edward H. Adelson, Professor of Vision Science at MIT in 1995.1 The image depicts a checkerboard with light and dark squares. The optical illusion is that the area of the image labeled A appears to be a darker color ...
33
I always prefer a very dark grey to pure #000. The choice might look personal, but here's the theory behind it:
There are very little 100% black things in nature. All black objects you see have some for of light reflected on them, shadows are never completely black.
When you #000 in a design, it overpowers the other colors. It attracts too much attention,...
32
It's a rather simple optical illusion, really--the colours of the environment influence how you see the dress's colours. I could elaborate, but xkcd's Randall Munroe has explained it with just a single picture:
The two dresses in this illustration have the exact same colours: #879abd for the blue and #715e3a for the gold.
edit: To actually answer Ryan's ...
32
There is no single definable point when the CMYK Process Colour printing was discovered. High fidelity process colour reproduction printing has been a gradual series of technical refinements.
The persons responsible are, however, known.
Printed colour reproduction grew rapidly in popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to today, when (...
30
Any single colour can be worked into a working colour setting, even for a website. So, yes, they are right in stating that using their blue is good for brand recognition.
A good idea might be to take the original #2DCCD3 and create less bright, saturated versions of it to use next to the base colour. You can create these shades using the HSB colour model. ...
28
Since you are asking "why are they perceived differently", here is another (very geeky) thing to consider: the perceived luminescence of an RGB colour. This is hard to apply, so take my answer almost just as trivia : )
The luminescence value of a colour of indicates how "lit up" you perceive it. If the colour would be a light bulb, a colour with low ...
26
These are all interesting answers, but a tad esoteric. The reason is rather simple. Contrast is good for readability, but too much can be considered unnecessary at best, and detrimental at worst.
Nearly all printed text is black on white paper...but rarely is it pure white paper. It's often an off-white. And even then, because it's printed, it's using ...
24
Take a look at this answer. How to make a given color a bit darker or lighter?
Where you simply take the separated values of each RGB component and divide the values.
But we have one problem, there is not just one way to make a color transition.
The first aproach will give you the shortest route (1) but probably that route is not what you need.
This is ...
23
There are a lot out there, but here are some of my favorite generators. Most listed allow you to enter in your own color like you specified.
ColorFavs - Palette from image as well as gallery of palettes & colors from other's images
Pictaculous - Palette from image (opposite is image from color)
ColorKitty - Palette from image
Cohesive Colors - New ...
23
With full credit to @Wolff for these images. As was discussed, grey is 100% relative to lighting, surrounding colors, perception, and the method you are measuring. Take these images for example. The main image actually has no "red" in it at all. If you take an eye dropper and measure any area that looks red, they are all actually shades of grey.
...
22
It's a matter of whether your brain thinks it's a dark dress under warm (yellow) lighting, or a light dress in a shadow.
(I take no credit for the above image)
For the record, here is the actual dress. The black shows up as gold-tinted in the picture because of the massive over-exposure under a warm (yellow) light.
20
The google palettes are monochromatic. Which keeps the same RGB ratio shifting the Lightness and saturation up or down. To do this you have to convert the RGB value to HSL representation (Hue, Saturation, Lightness), alter the lightness and saturation then convert back if need be. It is possible to keep it in the RGB space while calculating, but the math is ...
19
According to Google, blue is:
Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with
depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence,
intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven. Blue is considered beneficial
to the mind and body.
All good things, and generally things that companies want to be associated with. Here is a ...
19
Normally I wouldn't post in a question that has been answered as succinctly as this one, but I do think there is a bit of information to add here.
Coming from a graphic design background, there is also the concept of "warm" and "cool" grays. These are grays that have a higher presence of warm or cool colours in their mix respectively.
#111, #222, #333 - ...
19
In 1906, the Eagle Printing Ink Company incorporated the four-colour
wet process inks for the first time. These four colours were cyan,
magenta, yellow, and black (also known as key), hence the name CMYK.
It was discovered that these four colours can be combined to produce
an almost unlimited number of richer, darker tones.
Link:
http://www.clubink....
17
Simply:
CMYK is not mixed. A printing process generally do not mix colors. It is kind of the holy grail of printing processes but it does not really exist as of yet.
What happens instead is that printing processes layer transparent inks on top of each other. Each ink only being able to produce either full ink color or no ink color. The indeterminate colors ...
17
T h i s d o e s n o t c o m p u t e .
< h u m a n m o d e o n >
Color theory is not about numbers, it is not about angles. Nobody will be around measuring the color angle of the palette used to approve it or not.
It is about taste, about culture, about ambient, about feeling. It is a psychological interpretation, not a numerical one.
We ...
16
Here are a couple of things you could do...
Stroke the black:
Use an outer Glow, this may not work depending on the rest of the design:
Stroke all of them, this is what I think I would do:
16
I think you don't have many more options that make sense. It's logical to use the 2 colors in the box and the question mark makes the message clear too.
But maybe you could play with the angle of your colors, and the font style too.
On the first one, I simply changed the angle and it seems to interfere less with the question mark. It really changes the ...
16
Lab Primer
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. (Yeats)
Lab, which I often read as Lab but is properly said L-a-b, is amazing. It makes the world a more colorful place. If you've ever taken magic mushrooms, its kinda like that. With Magic Mushrooms subtle color differences can become far more apparent because ...
16
TLDR: No, spot colours are not more limited than CMYK, and they aren't treated the same because they are different printing processes.
Process printing (or CMYK printing, also sometimes called full-colour printing) uses separate inks. They aren't mixed.
The inks are layered onto the paper, usually using halftone dots to build up a pattern of dots to ...
15
It's a reflection that a lot of logos are blue is all. Blues and Reds tend to be the popular colors these days. And, really, they've been popular colors for logos for a long time.
In addition, I'm not sure what you define as a successful web startup, but note that today's startup world is mostly a bunch of people pumping out as many ideas as they can as ...
14
I see a lot of people commenting things like "there's no right answer" which I (sort of) disagree with... There's certainly at least one right answer, maybe a few and I'm sure there's a bunch of wrong answers too, good design is about reaching the best possible solution based on the resources and time available to you And surely such a solution is going to ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible