Design Principles - Study Task 1

Colour Theory

After an introduction into colour theory we explored how to put that into context and the use of colour within certain situations. In this task we were asked to select four genres of books and explore their relationship to colour by finding the common colours associated with that genre and changing it to something less common, here is what i produced:

 Horror: Usually horror novels use dark colours to compliment the dark nature of the story. To figure out the overiding colours of this cover I colour grabbed the darkest part of the cover (the darkness around the door) and the most vibrant part of the greenish light. Then using the pantone colour book I got the code for the closest matching colour.

The codes were:
Black/dark grey: Pantone P Process Black U
Dark green: Pantone P 177-16 U

 Crime: Again with crime novels, colours are usually dark and quite often feature the colour red to symbolise blood. Using the same process i gathered the pantone codes.

The codes were:

Grey:  Pantone P 169-16 U
Dark red: Pantone P 56-16 U

 Fairy Tales: As most fairy tales derive from very old stories, a lot of the book covers were very old and traditional looking. i found that most used this sort of maroon/bugandy colour as a base.

The code was:

Burgandy: Pantone P 64-15 U













Western: With this genre, a lot of yellow/bright orange was used, probably to reflect the colour of sand which is very prominent in western films.

The code was:

Yellow: Pantone P 10-7 U












After this initial research we then re imagined the potential colour for these genres. I set it out like the penguin book covers as it was something we had looked at and it allowed the colour to be very dominant on the cover.



Horror: For this one we chose yellow. The reason for this is its a very vibrant and jarring colour which can be shocking to the eye. We thought this went well and complimented the themes that are usually presented within horror books. Also, yellow is used a lot in nature to represent a warning for example on wasps.



Code:

Pantone P Process Yellow U

 Crime: For this we chose blue, it doesn't represent danger or anything related to blood but for us the combination of blue and white reminds us of flashing blue lights on police cars and ambulances and the blue and white colour scheme of the police, something that fits the theme of crime.

Code:

Pantone P 112-6 U

 Fairy tales: It was hard to pick an alternative colour for this one as modern fairy tales for children normally include a huge range of colours. Despite this we went with quite a soft pink. To us this really represented children and childlike things, which is closely associated with fairy tales.

Code:

Pantone P 75-5 U

Western: For the western we went with this light green, Western novels and films often feature a lot of outdoor scenery and are based in rural settings and because of this we thought green was a good way to represent the rural nature of western novels.

Code:

Pantone P 157-8 U