Let Canva Be Your “Seeing Eye Dog” For Color Matching Success

I’ve known Nathaniel for ten years now. I coached him in a speech and debate club when he was in high school. I mentored him one-on-one for a year. For 5 years we’ve been in the same Toastmasters Club. Now he is a radio announcer for the biggest radio station in town.

Along the way he started a small business helping people get more out of their computers. He considered helping people create websites. He went on to other things which ended up being on the radio each day for the four hours before Rush Limbaugh takes the afternoons.

I’ve known Nathaniel all these years and only recently found out that he is color blind. Not good if you want to be a web designer. No problem if you want to be a radio announcer.

At least Nathaniel has an excuse. Drive through any neighborhood and you’ll see houses with hideous paint colors. The word “hideous” includes the words “hide” and “us” if you look carefully. Let’s expand this to “hide from us” ugly paint choices. Sadly modern house paint can last twenty years so the color mismatch lasts a long time.

A little known fact is that ugly colored paint costs the same as beautiful colored paint. Either way there is no money-back guarantee.

Thankfully, Canva has made color selection far easier than ever before. You have no excuses any longer.

I direct you to their design article, “10 color inspiration secrets only designers know about.”

Color is an integral element of good design. With so much psychology and emotions attached to the hues you choose, it can be tricky to curate your color palette when designing. Below, we list 10 color inspiration secrets so that you can get the perfect color combination every time.

We know that specific hues can provoke different emotions, associations, and responses that affect how your brand is perceived. Put simply, color choices can make or break a design. In fact, research has shown that color can increase brand recognition by up to 80%, memory, engagement with a design piece and text comprehension, so when choosing a color combinationfor your design (especially your logo!), you want to make sure that you are saying something with the colors you choose.

Fortunately, we are far from the times when our color choices were limited to a small batch of natural pigments. Our options are no longer whatever colors minerals, animals, and plants had to offer. With such an overwhelming amount of color options, selecting a palette for a design project has become excruciating, to say the least. The Colourlovers community has indexed nearly 8 million user-named colors, while there are over 16 million possible hexadecimal color combinations.

While there are endless color choices, it’s recommended that when designing, it’s best to stick to three or four colors. This will inform create the color palette you work with.

Overwhelmed yet? No need to worry. We asked top designers from the Creative Market community to share their advice for creating stunning color combinations.

https://www.canva.com/learn/color-tips/

Of course, even if you’re not color blind or legally blind you probably can’t match colors like a pro. Even with this amazing article. You can invest the time needed to get better or just send Canva’s article to your graphic designer with ideas on what you need done. You’ll be armed and not quite as dangerous.

Need to paint your house? Take your graphic designer to Home Depot and let her make the final choice on colors. Your neighbors will thank you.