Color psychology is the science of how color affects human behavior. It’s is used in all aspects of design, starting from items in a grocery stores, to website design, because color is an important element that convey a specific message to users. Color has an enormous sway over our attitudes and emotions, and it’s important to know which color to use for your message.

Every color means something to every person, but here are the most common meanings of colors.

Colors also can be classified as warm (red, orange and yellow) or cool (green, blue and purple). Warm colors are bright and vivid, while cool colors are calm, less aggressive and soothing. In design, warm colors used to make something stand out and pay attention, and cool colors mostly used as a background.

Tints and shades

A tint is the result of adding white to a color, a shade is when you add black. Tint and shade help you to create a palette from the same based color, which simplify your color selection process.

Saturation

Saturation makes color more intense, richer and stronger, and it’s used to make something specific on page like links or buttons more noticeable for users.

Additive color model is based on percentages of red, green and blue (RGB) light (used as colors of the screen). Subtractive color model is a mixture of color pigments and based on cyan, magenta, yellow and black colors (CMYK);printers use this model. When CMYK are combined, they create black color, but when RBG colors are combined, they create white color.

Color wheel is a diagram of visualized relationships between colors. The traditional color wheel contains 12 colors;they divide a circle into 12 slices, where each slice is a primary, a secondary or a tertiary color.

Primary colors in traditional color wheel are red, blue and yellow, and can be combined to make a secondary colors.

Secondary colors consist of two primary colors mixed together. The secondary colors are orange, green and purple.

Tertiary colors are made by mixing a primary color with an adjacent secondary color (red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-purple, red-purple).