How do you chose a color pallet for your style guide?
polycounter lvl 11
Hello everyone. I've been looking at 2 games recently. Final Fantasy X and the latest Monster Hunter. I remember really being in love with the FFX colors in both the world and the characters. I never really discovered why. So how do people come up with color schemes? The DOTA workshop document said all of their characters had a tridac color scheme with the hue, but value and saturation are free game. But is their more to it than that?
Someone said FFX and MH had a "neutral" color scheme. This is a term I am admittedly not familiar with. At least not withing the confines of what it means in HSV or RGB space. I sampled some monster hunter screenshots and found that most of the base colors are both below 50% saturation and above 50% lightness. Obviously there is going to be some margin of error since I'm sampling the screen and not the actual base texture colors but for the most part It's hsv = any, >50, <50 respectively. My theory is that there is a conscious and deliberate effort made by the art team to keep a certain saturation and value range in all their base colors. Am I on to something?
What factors do you guys consider when making a unified color pallet for your style guides?
Someone said FFX and MH had a "neutral" color scheme. This is a term I am admittedly not familiar with. At least not withing the confines of what it means in HSV or RGB space. I sampled some monster hunter screenshots and found that most of the base colors are both below 50% saturation and above 50% lightness. Obviously there is going to be some margin of error since I'm sampling the screen and not the actual base texture colors but for the most part It's hsv = any, >50, <50 respectively. My theory is that there is a conscious and deliberate effort made by the art team to keep a certain saturation and value range in all their base colors. Am I on to something?
What factors do you guys consider when making a unified color pallet for your style guides?
Replies
From said link:
"All that to say: When you are choosing colors for your brand, be intentional. Color matters. Choosing your favorite color is not always the best route to a great brand. Today I’m breaking down for you how I choose color schemes for the brands I design and telling you how to choose the best color scheme for your blog or biz."
I've reported this spammer before, but nothing was ever done about it, so: this guy's a spammer. He just copy pastes vaguely related snippets from google, and his profile links to an online pill store.
Something like red or yellow is a great color to use to immediately catch someone's attention, because our eyes will want to look at it first. Certain colors also look better/worse when paired with each other.
The topic itself though is very huge and might be too big for a forum post. I've bought books and read websites devoted to color theory just to understand it.
The clear overlap is that all the artists are looking for beauty.
As to how to make it look unified, pixel art has some theory on that:
- Pixel art colour palette tutorial by Kiwinuptuo
- Making a blending matrix
- Multipurpose 16 colour palette (The details is what's interesting.)
It's interesting that your approach was very technical (HSV and percentages). As mentioned above, you'll find a lot of color theory things for areas like branding through graphic design but for video games there are like 3 styleguides online. It's pretty bad. I'm building a GDC talk on something which may shed some light on to the process for selecting something like color.
When choosing a colour palette I am very aware of color symbolism, their meanings and how they connect, how they compliment each other and even how they contrast one another.
It's very easy to just pick colors which you feel work well when designing a single character(or icon, fx, logo, lighting a scene). However, when you suddenly need to create a line-up, or opposing teams, or multiple factions - that is where a styleguide with distinctive colors becomes essential, not only for the art director, and not only for the wider team - but for anyone who plays the game.
The topic is so massive because of how it applies to everything within a game. From the colors used in your logo, to your menu & interface, your signs & feedback, your lighting, characters, architecture, the list goes on and on and it all adds up to create a unique feeling to your game.
I am curious how many people have access to something (styleguide,powerpoint,word doc) which describes the reasoning behind the visuals for games they're working on?
While it may not specifically address colours, I'm sure you can see how this would help out immensely and make the task far easier!