Tips & Tricks To Amp Up Your Designs: Selecting & Using Accent Colors

 

Most everyone has heard of using accent colors, perhaps mostly when painting a room and creating an "accent wall" or in fashion wherein someone might have an "accent piece" in their outfit. However, accent colors are used frequently in graphic design as well and can be incredibly powerful when used correctly.

How to select an accent color:

image credit: https://edu.gcfglobal.org/

In order to select an accent color, take a look at the color wheel and look for what is considered a complementary set of colors, meaning a set of two colors that reside opposite of each other on the color wheel. From there, you can form the majority of your piece's color scheme from one of those colors or colors similar to it with a singular color from the other side of the color wheel as the accent color, usually a shade that is much brighter, lighter, warmer, or cooler than the other shades you want to use.

While it is easiest to use mainly warm colors with a cool-toned accent color or mainly cool-toned colors with a warm accent color, you don't necessarily have to do it that way. As long as the accent color strongly differentiates from the other colors being used in some way another (tone, brightness, darkness, etc.) it can still work appropriately.

Using an accent color:

Once you have an accent color chosen, you can use it in a variety of ways. However, it can only be an accent color if it is used SPARINGLY. Otherwise it can appear to be the main color of a piece rather than simply the accent.

The easiest ways to use accent colors is to have lines, titles, and some shapes using the color throughout a piece. However, accent colors can also be used in logos, as seen here:

image credit: visme

Accent colors can also be used within uses of imagery, textures, and patterns to give a piece more "life" and interesting vibrancy as seen here:

Using accent colors is fairly easy and fantastic way to increase the quality of your designs and make them more interesting. Just remember to use them CAREFULLY and SPARINGLY, otherwise they will cease to be accent colors at all.