How to use color overlay in your design?

Everyone wants to decorate their home beautifully, so they spend money to hire designers to show off their skills.

It seems that once the designer took care of it, the house was like Cinderella putting on a gorgeous dress. It suddenly transformed into a pleasant and warm little home that was also more honorable when receiving guests.

Just like the "Dream Renovator" that has always attracted much attention before, the difference between before and after the renovation is surprising and even magical. So the value of designers is reflected here. A good designer can turn something bad into something magical.

So, what kind of magic tricks do designers use to change the status quo? Maybe everyone wants to steal a lesson. In fact, the quality of home decoration depends on hard decoration, while the final beauty mostly depends on soft furnishings. Learning how to design soft furnishings is both difficult and easy. There are still some tricks to be found.

So today, Xiaoruan is here to share with you a quick and easy way to match soft outfits. Strictly speaking, the rapid combination of soft furnishings is specially prepared for the shopping mall display system. This requires the stage setter to improvise the display based on the existing soft furnishing products on site without any preparation. , it requires the stage setter to have very keen theme construction ability, color coordination ability, space control ability and story coordination ability.

To talk about theme construction ability, it means that the plan and imagination in one's mind before setting up the display is relatively clear, with a direction and a picture. The perfection of the theme and thematic proposition determine the design. Whether the direction is correct and whether the best effect can be achieved in the end depends on the support and help of the other three abilities.

When there is a bunch of miscellaneous furniture items placed in front of you, you may not know how to place them and how to start. The most troublesome thing among them is the selection and matching of colors, which is a test. Color coordination ability. Color reconstruction, reorganization of the color system, giving life to colors, and making the space energetic.

There is also a golden rule for color matching. The golden ratio of general home colors is 6:3:1, where "6" is the background color, including the basic wall, floor, and ceiling colors, and "3" is the matching color. Color, including the basic colors of the home, etc., "1" is the decorative color, including the color of the decorations, etc. This matching ratio can make the colors in the home rich, but not cluttered, with clear priorities and prominent themes.

At the same time, it is also necessary to determine a color impression as the dominant color. For example, when color matching a room, you can use a larger area of ??beige, camel, tea gray, etc., and then add other colors according to personal preferences on this basis. Impressive combinations come in, including throw pillows, small pieces of furniture or accessories.

Color should also be analyzed according to the different functions of the home space. Even rooms with the same function sometimes differ due to the different temperaments of the residents. After determining the rough color, is it easy to put things into place and complete the design? No, this is not enough. For example, if you want to arrange the following prepared items in a corner of your home, how to display them in the most suitable and beautiful way requires a certain amount of space control ability. Using design to form a unified shape for all items can make the space more stable and the visual effect more comfortable. The linear composition method is a simple, easy-to-understand and easy-to-operate method. We analyze many good works carefully and basically there are some color circuit diagrams, but we just didn’t find them. An excellent designer must know how to discover and use these color lines, so that future designs will gradually improve.

Linear composition includes: single linear composition, bilinear composition and multi-linear composition. The arranged scene above uses the single linear method. The so-called single linearity means single color linearity. Black, white and gray are not included in the colors, so there is only the brass color group in the entire space. Among the large areas of black, white and gray, the brass color looks very beautiful. From hanging paintings to wall decorations to glass table legs, plus some similar colored ornaments, the entire streamlined color system makes the space look simple and elegant.

Single linear design is relatively simple, we just need to grasp the fluency and coherence. There is also the issue of the volume at the beginning and end of this line. Single linear composition is relatively simpler than bilinear composition. When we are unable to control bilinear composition, we should try to use single linear composition. Multi-linear composition is more difficult, but a good designer must master it.

Key points of multi-linear composition:

1. Try not to let multiple lines cross too much.

2. Both cool and warm colors and neutral colors should be matched to make each line smooth and natural. In soft furnishings, if furniture and accessories of similar colors are connected together to form a quadrilateral, the picture will appear very scattered and unstable. Therefore, when designing, remember to use the most stable triangular composition.

Principles of pillow fabric decoration

1. Symmetrical decoration

2. Asymmetrical decoration

3. Large and small decorations

4. Decorate in small ways inside and outside

You also need to keep in mind eight principles when doing soft decoration design

Determine the style first and then make soft decoration

At the beginning of the decoration, there is a soft decoration plan

Get a reasonable proportion

Combine stability with lightness

Use contrast and harmony

Determine the visual center point

The principle of unity and change

The last and most important thing is the story coordination ability, a space Soft decoration design can convey a story and an artistic conception to people. Making the space speak is the skill pursued by designers. Each ingenious soft decoration design shows the story that the designer wants to express in his heart. This is the real intention of the design and the difference between each work.

Colors are divided into RGB and CMYK. When using colors, the first thing to consider is whether the work is an electronic display or a printed matter. If it is a printed matter, RGB cannot be used, because some colors cannot be printed in four-color printing, and electronic equipment You should choose RGB, the display will be brighter than CMYK.

The easiest way to use color is to use the product color as the tone. A work should not exceed three to four colors.

Color Color should be selected based on the design content

In order to use color, a highly expressive visual factor, to arouse various emotions in the viewer, we often study color and understand the emotions of color. However, few designers pay attention to the expression techniques and methods of color. This article mainly introduces the application of color overlay in design through some excellent brand design cases.

Superposition refers to the method of superimposing graphics and attribute features on a basic graphic. Overlay mode mixes the "base" color of the image with the "blend" color to produce an intermediate color. Colors within the Base Color that are darker than the Blend Color cause the Blend Color to be doubled, colors that are lighter than the Blend Color will cause the Blend Color to be obscured, and highlights and shadows within the image Parts remain unchanged, so overlay mode has no effect when shading black or white pixels.

When using color overlay, you need to start from the actual properties of color and the laws of color science, avoid messy situations, and seek differentiation in color and form. When using color overlay, you should maintain a rigorous and professional attitude. Each different method of overlay can produce completely different visual effects.

In the overlay application of colors, adjustments and modifications must be made according to the composition relationship of each color, the light and shade, hue and area. Different brightness, purity, hue and shape of colors give people a different effect. The difference in weight is also very big. Warm colors are heavier than cold colors, and those with high lightness are lighter than those with low lightness. At the same time, we should pay attention to the basic rules of color in the composition to make it more coordinated during use.

Any color block should not appear isolated in the composition. It requires the same or similar color blocks to echo each other in the up, down, front and back, left and right directions. And make rich changes in density, virtual reality, and size in the form of points, lines, and surfaces.

For example, you can extract colors from daily life and superimpose colors in the form of watercolor. Good superposition can give people a sense of affinity and visual impact.

Color is an important component in any design. Whether you prefer bright, bold colors or prefer simple black and white, how you use color can have a big impact on the overall design.

Using color overlay in design is a way to use color to make a statement. This means you cover an image or video with a translucent colored box. It can add meaning to an image, draw attention to it, and help you make the most of your limited artistic options.

Today we will take a look at a series of color overlay techniques that can bring some inspiration to your creations.

Try Gradient Colors

Gradient colors are super cool and are the most effective and dramatic option for using color overlays.

One of the nice things about gradients is that they can be used with two colors – think about your branding here, or with a single color to create a visual focus. Bright color contrast can attract users and bring some sparkle to the design.

This trend can be reminiscent of Spotify, which uses gradients and duotone overlays to emphasize playlists. This color gives new life to images that users are used to seeing (promotional images of musicians).

This is also an idea that is easier for you to replicate.

Find an image

Create a gradient using brand colors

Have fun!

Solid colors set the tone

Solid color overlays can be just as eye-catching as gradients, but have a lot more meaning depending on the color chosen. For example, the overlay of sepia can immediately evoke memories of past events and a sense of historical chronology.

The same is true for fashion colors. Using bright, saturated colors can be associated with flat design and textured design, and can inspire a sense of realism or fashion.

When using a solid color as an overlay, consider color saturation and transparency. These elements can also add meaning. Heavy color combinations - reducing opacity and adding saturation - put more emphasis on the color itself rather than the image behind it; lighter, more subtle image combinations put the focus on the image.

Consider dark or light colors

You don’t always need to use one color for overlay, sometimes you can consider black, white and gray. Using these colors and tones can really change the mood of a design.

As you might imagine, dark overlays create a more emotional environment and light overlays are associated with fun. Another benefit of this is the emotion of the black and white picture itself, how it relates to color or Hue collaboration? Will pictures and colors and messages get along?

The image above uses white overlay to emphasize the black text on the black and white image, but pay attention to the emotion on the photographer's face: he is grinning. The combination of colors and images seems to invite you and make you want to interact with the photographer or even hire him to work for you.

Choose high-contrast images

When you plan to use image overlays in your design, photo (or audio) composition is important. A flat color overlay will make the image look bland, and using an image with a high contrast between light and dark will make the result even better.

If your image doesn’t have enough contrast, consider adding contrast in your editing software or reselecting the image. Especially for beginners, using black and white images makes it easier to see and improves contrast. The image above provides a great example of overlaying a black and white image (it has a cool effect – the contrast between colorless and vivid colors).

The picture should look natural (or unnatural)

When you use color overlays, there are two suggestions:

1. The picture should look natural , color, lighting and shadows should appear in a natural position. The mask looks more subtle, as shown above.

2. The image should be completely changed and no one will care that the color mask has been used (like most of the cases in this article).

There is no real compromise here. If images fall into these "extremes," users may think too long about color choices and lose focus on the site content. Don’t use color overlay to distract users, it should be used to enhance the design.

Try using accent overlays

While the previous examples show how to use color overlays on large images, this is not the only way to make the most of this technique. Color overlays work well as accents.

The two examples above effectively achieve this in different ways.

The navigation bar in the top picture uses bright and transparent green, and the solid color above highlights the navigation bar. It maintains the brand colors throughout the design, while display items use other different colors. The effect is simple, and it looks softer than filling the navigation bar with a solid color to draw attention to it.

Figure 2 uses another approach, using a color overlay as a hover effect on the web page to tell you more project details. Any element covered in red is also a clickable element. Notably, layer overlays serve as a visual cue to users, telling them what they want to know and providing a link to the full text path.