At the beginning of my designer career, an incident happened, which I remember until today. As I was working on a screen design, an older and more experienced colleague of mine, an art director, looked over my shoulder and said: “Todoroki, don’t you see that these two colors in the background just don’t fit together?” He was arrogant as most designers are, but I had a feeling, he was right this time. The truth was that I did not know, what is “right”, my color choice was absolutely arbitrary, and it was easy to make me unsure. That was the reason for me to begin studying design. My aim was to be sure about what I am doing, not out of arrogance, but out of knowledge.

Although the studying has given me a lot, actually the opposite of my expectations has come: I was taught, that in design there are no such things as wrong or right, that the creative process is always the one with an unknown result – otherwise the design job is actually already done. Of course we had to paint color wheels, but there came no further explanation.

I had the impression that the numerous books about color theory haven’t brought me much further in the sense, that they did not help to make a deliberate and reasonable color decision, starting every new design project. The information from psychological studies, published in most books on this theme, say that red is a color of blood and has an aggressive or erotic influence or that violet stands for fantasy and dreams and green for nature and blue for calmness was reasonable and important, but actually barely useful in concrete situations.

The color harmony theories seem useful at the first glance and must definitely belong to the basic knowledge of a professional designer, but... Must a good design necessarily be harmonious? Is harmonious color combination universally good? Color harmony is a science and thus eternal. So, it does not give any clue about contemporary trends or regional cultural differences. The very same color composition may look well in Japan and would be barely acceptable in Europe. It may look cool now, but would become “out”, when copied by everybody. Colors which are good for a bank would probably be not satisfactory for an entertainment site for kids.

In the past there was no color freedom. For many centuries it was a question of money and even power. Some painting and textile colors were extremely expensive and thus reserved for their unique purposes. Even in the 20th century using colors for print was a luxury until the last decades of the century. Even nowadays achieving certain print tones can be possible only using expensive additional solid colors. Web designers were restricted until the last years by web palette which allowed only poor color choice. Luckily technical development made it obsolete. Nowadays every web and screen designer can and must choose out of 16.7 Millions of color tones. Many take themselves their freedom away, fixing on very few “favorite” colors.

The aim that I have is to analyze modern color trends, in the context of their use. Probably, most of my experience will to a great extend be personal and subjective. I am making this research for my own fun, but I am also addressing designer colleagues, who are usually in love with one specific style, their style, accepting nothing else. I want to provoke a discussion. I want to give easy to follow advices for beginners. And I would appreciate any kind of feedback.