Image//Book Works//Types of Yellow.

Starting to surely (yet rather slowly...) make progress with the design decisions for my 'Book Works' 'Yellow & The Psychology of Colour' book design outcome. One of the key contents chapters in my book, which I feel could result in some great minimal, visually communicative design is distinguishing the "types of yellow" which I had previously looked at on my Design Context blog. From my research into the meanings of colour, shades of yellow played a very important part, and I felt that visually distinguishing them would help to show just how much difference there is.

From the list originally sourced and blogged, I went onto google to gather colour swatches of the selected colours to make into simple vector-based swatches and was really shocked with some of the colour results- some that I wouldn't even class as yellow at all- either too acidic green or very orange as opposed to one of it's primary formulas, yellow (the subject matter).

I decided that I would minimise the list and keep the top ten that I felt distinguished the variations and visual associations with yellow most effectively (shown in the image above).

Despite yellow ochre being a commonly associated colour (largely through fine art and painting- with an oil and acrylic paint know by the same name), the reverse of the name was frustrating me when all of the other colour names ended with 'yellow' as opposed to the description. Reversed the name seemed a little unusual as it is so commonly used and recognised. Therefore, I decided to not use it, and instead create my own 'sunshine yellow' swatch which I think works great with the set of existing swatches.

My finalised swatch list.

Having previously chosen the Adobe Kuler 'Sunny Side Up' + B&W (with various tints) as my colour palette, I felt that it could be edited slightly to fit a little more with the swatches distinguished for this chapter. Therefore, I decided to make slight variations- one of which was matching the 'sunshine yellow' font into the main body of the book design as I felt this was a really strong visual communicator of the colour- and would look great flooded- perhaps for the cover design, etc?

I went on to make a simple doughnut/pie chart to demonstrate each of the individual colours and their tints from 100%-10% as the colour wheel rotates round. Really simple, though I'm quite pleased with the design. Working to a square-based format, one swatch may get sacrificed at a later date (to make the structure of the design more even) though for now, although simple, I'm quite happy with the minimalism. First infographic designs- DONE!