Color for Designers: Ninety-five things you need to know when choosing and using colors for layouts and illustrations

Introduction

Say you pull into a service station with an engine problem. And that it’s your lucky day. A mechanic with an unmistakable air of mastery strides out of the garage, opens the hood of your car, listens briefly to the engine, asks you a couple questions about its behavior, nods knowingly, and gives a wink as if to say, Not to worry, I’ll have you on the road in a jiffy. Clearly, the expert mechanic’s intuition has already zeroed in on the one or two fixes that will almost certainly handle the issue.

Relief fills your mind, and also the questions, What, exactly, fuels this expert mechanic’s problem-solving, mystery-dissolving, and confusion-absolving intuition? And why can’t I even begin to figure out a problem like this on my own?