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Color is an important aspect of design. It can reflect a person’s mood. Color code depends on where we use it. Either it may be for web or media publishing (printing). Combination of RGB (red, blue & green) will be used in web. These are called additive colors. Adding these three colors will turn into white. By adding different levels of red, blue and green we can get a gamut (a complete subset of colors) of these colors. This RGB model is used in electronic systems.

In printing technology we use subtractive colors. CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow & black) are called subtractive colors. These four colors are added to bring black color. Generally each color is caused by absorbing some wavelength of light and reflecting others. CMYK color model is used for printing purposes. Different amount of cyan, magenta, yellow, black are used in cartridges that are used in printers.

Care should be taken by designers about which color mode are they working with. Sometimes it happens when publishing an image of CMYK color results in different colored image on the internet. Apart from additive colors, subtractive colors we have color film, Technicolor etc. There is a separate study in the field of color mixing. There are different meanings for colors. For example black stands for seriousness, like this we have definitions for every color that we see. When designing a brochure or a webpage think about the colors which will suit human eyes and also the combination. Good designs may go worthless due to improper color combination.

Representing a color is very important in design. Colors can be usually represented in percentage. For example red (100%), green (100%), blue (100%) will give white color. Use designing software like Adobe Photoshop etc and try to reduce percentage of different colors. We can get some new shades. This will happen in CMYK color mode also. Another way of representing color is through hex color code like #FFFFFF, #333333 etc. Software can easily give us the hex code that is in use. This type of code is very important because we can use hexadecimal color code in HTML also. Color depth gives us the depth of an image. High bit color increases the image size and quality of image. Depth varies from 1 bit to 48 bit. Color depth plays an important role in quality of an image.