Vent: Spent 2 hours trying to match a coral and olive pairing for a client logo

I kept tweaking the coral shade because it felt too neon next to the olive, but every muted version just made it look like puke. Finally realized the olive needed to shift cooler (like a sage) instead of warm, and it clicked in 5 minutes. Has anyone else had a color fix that was way simpler than their rabbit hole suggested?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancy325d ago

Read an article last week about how our eyes perceive warm and cool colors together and it totally clicked with what you're describing. The brain sees warm coral fighting with warm olive and just reads it as muddy or sick. Shifting the green cooler separates them visually without even needing to touch the coral much. Love that you found the fix in 5 minutes after all that struggle. I've definitely been down similar rabbit holes where the answer was actually something tiny like a temperature shift. Colors are weird like that, they trick you into overcomplicating things.

oscarwilliams17d ago

Colors trick you into overcomplicating things" is basically my whole design journey in a nutshell lol. I once spent three hours moving a button three pixels left and right before realizing the real issue was the drop shadow was too dark. The color temperature thing messed me up too, I had this palette I was so proud of and everyone kept saying it looked "off" but I couldn't see why. Took me two weeks and a random YouTube video to figure out I had two warm greens fighting each other. So yeah, five minutes of actual understanding beats hours of guessing every time.