I’m Jane, Senior Graphic Designer at Creative Company, and after over 30 years working in design, there’s one part of the job that I still find fascinating: colour.
Choosing colours is one of those things that can look deceptively simple from the outside. Find a nice blue. Pick a green that feels fresh. Add something bright to make it pop.
Actually, colour is doing a huge amount of work in a design before anyone has read a single word. It can make something feel expensive, playful, clinical, rebellious, reassuring, traditional or completely out of place. And often, we’re reacting to those signals without consciously realising it.
What is colour theory in graphic design?
At its most practical, colour theory helps designers understand how colours work together and how people are likely to respond to them. There’s the technical side: the colour wheel, complementary and analogous colours, contrast, saturation, temperature, tints, shades and all the rest of it.
Knowing which colours technically work together is only part of being a designer. We also have to think about what those colours mean.
Green, for example, has become almost unavoidable in sustainability branding. Soft neutrals and pastels appear again and again in brands aimed at babies and young children. Primary colours can immediately feel playful and youthful. White suggests cleanliness and purity, which is one reason it has been used so heavily in everything from washing powder packaging to healthcare.
None of those associations are rules. They’re learned visual shortcuts, and that makes them incredibly useful.
Colour can say something before your copy does
Imagine walking down a supermarket aisle and seeing two versions of the same premium product. One is in bright primary-coloured packaging. The other is almost entirely black, with restrained typography and a small metallic detail.
Nobody needs to put the words “this one is the expensive one” across the second box. You already know.
Black hasn’t always carried that particular commercial meaning. In food packaging especially, it would once have been an unusual choice. However, our associations with colour change. Through fashion, technology, automotive design, film and luxury branding, black has increasingly become shorthand for premium, sophisticated and exclusive. That’s what makes colour so interesting, its meaning isn’t fixed.
A designer has to understand both the established visual language of an industry and what happens when you deliberately step outside it.
Sometimes fitting in is exactly the right thing to do
There’s nothing inherently wrong with choosing the colour people expect.
If you’re designing something that needs to communicate cleanliness, safety or trust very quickly, familiar colour associations can do a lot of the heavy lifting. The same applies when an audience needs to understand a product or service almost instantly.
Good design isn’t about being different for the sake of it, but there are also times when looking exactly like everybody else is the problem.
If every business in your sector uses the same palette, the same imagery and the same visual cues, being appropriate can very quickly turn into being invisible — that’s when things get more interesting.
Knowing the rules means knowing when to disrupt them
When we worked on the identity for Stepwise Footcare, for example, there was an obvious visual territory available to us.
Healthcare, clinical blues, clean whites, safe, familiar, professional.
We didn’t need to abandon that language completely. Those associations are useful because they immediately tell people something about the service.
Instead, we pushed it.
Alongside that cleaner clinical foundation, brighter hero colours give the brand considerably more energy and help it stand apart from other providers in the area. It still belongs in healthcare, but it doesn’t disappear into a sea of predictable healthcare branding. That distinction matters.
Sometimes the best colour decision isn’t choosing between “expected” and “unexpected”. It’s understanding how much of each you need.
And then there’s fluorescent pink
I’ve always been drawn to fluorescent pink.
Not necessarily huge expanses of it. Quite often, it’s the opposite: one tiny dot, line or flash of fluorescent pink in an otherwise restrained design.
Your eye goes straight to it.
Some of that probably comes from my own formative years as a designer. As a teenager, I was going to nightclubs, experimenting with fashion and discovering music, and I loved the visual language surrounding punk and the scenes that followed it.
There was often a lot of black and white, interrupted by these brilliant punches of colour.
Fluorescent pink fitted perfectly.
And once you start looking at its history, you realise that demanding attention is practically built into it.
A colour designed to be noticed
Kassia St Clair explores fluorescent pink in The Secret Lives of Colour, and unlike many colours with histories stretching back through pigments, minerals and dyes, fluorescent pink feels distinctly manufactured: it belongs to the modern world.
By the 1960s, fluorescent colours were being embraced by advertisers and pop artists. In the 1970s, they appeared in everything from fluorescent crayons and highlighter pens to the increasingly confrontational graphics of punk.
In 1978, X-Ray Spex released The Day the World Turned Day-Glo, pairing Poly Styrene’s commentary on an increasingly synthetic world with suitably unnatural, eye-searing colour.
Punk was particularly good at using these colours. Against black, white and photocopied imagery, fluorescent shades didn’t politely complement the design. They interrupted it.
The clever bit is that true fluorescent colour really does behave differently. Fluorescent dyes absorb ultraviolet light and re-emit some of that energy as visible light. That’s what gives them the almost luminous quality ordinary highly saturated colours can imitate, but never quite reproduce.
The accent can be more powerful than the palette
That’s probably the biggest lesson fluorescent pink has given me as a designer. More colour doesn’t necessarily mean more impact.
Sometimes the smallest element on the page can control where somebody looks first.
A dot. A rule. A word. A highlight. A tiny piece of fluorescent pink surrounded by acres of black, white or neutral space.
Used properly, an accent colour creates hierarchy. It can direct attention towards a call to action, distinguish one piece of information from another or simply give an otherwise restrained identity something recognisable.
And yes, fluorescent pink has found its way into plenty of my designs over the years. I make no apologies.
A colour palette should have a reason for being there
When we develop a colour palette for a brand, we’re not simply assembling four or five colours that look nice next to each other. We’re asking what the business needs to communicate.
Who needs to notice it? What does the audience already associate with this sector? Do we want to reinforce those associations or challenge them? Which colour should dominate? Which should support it? Where does the eye need to go first? And, crucially, what are all the competitors doing?
Sometimes the answer is green, sometimes it’s blue, sometimes it’s black. And occasionally, thankfully, the answer is a tiny bit of fluorescent pink.
After more than 30 years of designing brands, packaging, campaigns, websites and everything in between, we know that the decisions that look simplest are often doing the most heavy lifting.
