What is color in design? Why is color among the most powerful and subjective design tools? In this Adobe Creative Cloud Foundations video, directed by Oddfellows, Pentagram New York partner and award-winning designer Eddie Opara “sheds light on color and helps unlock the power of the rainbow.”

Color is a challenge. It always is something that you can’t fully control even if you wanted to. Color is an inherent component of graphic design and no color is different. There’s no special color. It’s all about the sense of what it represents and how it moves us emotionally, dramatically, how reflects ideas of character and personality, mood, sense of resonance.

Then you have other elements, color combinations, and relationships with color and how colors react to other colors sense of contrast and thus color is a very subjective conversation but the approach of a designer is to put that subjectivity into an objective path.

Eddie Opara also summarizes color meanings and explains how he makes sure that a design functions in black and white before introducing color. “You apply color you enhance that function.”