Design 101: Using Value Structure - A Useful Color Theory Tip

🎁DOWNLOAD THIS PROJECT FILE & ASSETS FOR FREE! 🎁 The hardest thing about being a Motion Designer is often the ’design’ part. And, one of the most common questions we get is, “How do you choose the right colors for your designs?“ Unfortunately, there isn’t a silver bullet answer to that question, but today we’ll be teaching you something that’s pretty close. In this tutorial, Design Bootcamp instructor (and Emmy award winner) Mike Frederick will give you the skinny on Value, a component of color theory that will instantly upgrade your work once you understand it. - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - 🎓INTERACTIVE ONLINE CLASSES 🎓 Design Kickstart | All Courses | 🧭FREE 10-DAY INTRO COURSE 🧭 The Path to MoGraph | 🚴‍♀️FOLLOW US FOR MORE LEARNZ 🚴🏾‍♂️ Website | Podcast | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | --------------------------------------------------------------------- Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇 Michael Frederick (00:00): Hello there I’m Michael Frederick. And in this quick video, I’m going to teach you a very handy trick about using value to get your colors, to work better in your composition Now value and color theory or topics we talk about in depth in the design bootcamp course at school. What motion? So make sure to check that out. If you like what you learned today, also you can download the project files I’m using in this video to follow along. Details are in the description. Michael Frederick (00:40): Value is defined as the relative lightness or darkness of a color or hue. The greater, the difference in value of two objects, the greater the contrast. Now, if you search for the meaning of value, you will likely find this value scale chart right here. This scale represents the darkest values we see, which is on the far left side of the scale. And the lightest values a hundred percent white is on the right side. Now, most designs we create contain the values, which fall somewhere in the middle range of this scale. The most important thing to remember about this value scale is to pair values that have enough contrast between them. That’s the trick. So what happens if we don’t use enough contrast with value? If we decide to choose two values, side-by-side on this scale, we get a design outcome that looks like this muddy, yuck, not a good look. Michael Frederick (01:36): You can see in this design, the shapes are really hard to see now, why do you think that is if you squinted this frame, you’ll begin to notice that the shapes blend into the background, the shapes in the background share values that are really too close together. They almost blend as one value. So to fix this problem, choose two values that have more contrast. If we squint at this frame, you can clearly see that the lighter shapes pop off the darker background. This design tells the viewer where to look. This frame illustrates good emphasis hierarchy. And contrast contrast is probably one of the most important principles in design. And to reinforce the idea of contrast this chart right here, clearly shows how more contrast in value helps your eye. See what’s important in your design. Now, what if we add a cool color or a hue to the value scale? Michael Frederick (02:34): Well, we get a range of blue values that go from a dark blue to a lighter blue. And two terms that are commonly associated with value is tent and shade. Tent is what you get when you add lightness to a color or a hue and a shade is when you add darkness to a color or a hue. And on the flip side, if we add a warm color to the value scale, it looks like this. So what would happen if we picked two contrasting colors from these two color scales and combine them using color proportion into a single awesome design, what would happen? Well, here’s a great example of what can happen when a skilled designer combines two contrasting color values to create hierarchy and emphasis in this design, the fire is a brighter color that pops off the darker blue background. As a viewer. For the full transcript visit: