Match the Cover's Colors to
the Theme of Your Book

You should know the meanings and implications of various colors before you design your cover.

Use colors that are appropriate to your subject or your company, if possible. IBM blue and Coca Cola red come to mind. Pink and lavender are great for books appealing to women. And, dark blue would be a good hue for a novel about police.

Starting with a pure pigment, you add white to get tints, and black to get shades. Dark hues are more serious than light hues. Red, yellow, and orange are warm, friendly hues. Purple, blue, and green are cool hues. Specific hues have connotations that are more specific.

Red is hot and exciting. It is both love and anger. Red is power, hence the power tie and red carpet. Use red to get attention, but use it sparingly. Orange, yellow, and pink are harmonizing colors that work well with red to create a cheerful palette. Red sparkles on a gray background.

Pink is a gentle tint of red. Choose pink for little girls, romance, tenderness, and feminine subjects. Pink is great with black, gray, or blue. Pink and dark green can also be stunning.

Orange shares the passion of red and the cheeriness of yellow. Use it to get noticed without screaming. Orange on black, brown, or blue provides ample contrast.

Yellow is warm, bright, cheerful, and very much alive. It also has some negative connotations as in yellow coward. Yellow is a good companion for black, blue, brown, red and orange.

Gold shares the qualities of yellow; however, it is associated with wealth and extravagance. Gold is great with orange, green, brown, burgundy, blue or purple.

Green is life, nature, renewal, and the environment. On the downside, green is jealously, envy, and inexperience. Green goes well with brown or beige. This combination would be appropriate for organic gardening or recycling.

Blue is authoritative, strong, steadfast, and reassuring as in police uniforms and corporate suits. It is also associated with depression and feeling blue. Blue and yellow provide maximum contrast. Blue with light brown or beige is an environmentally friendly combination.

Purple is a complex hue combining warm red with cool blue. It is associated with royalty, nobility, religion, and delicate flowers. Purple looks good on beige. It is great with bright green.

Lavender is feminine, grace, and elegance. Pink with lavender, as mentioned earlier, is very feminine. Lavender works well with green and blue.

Brown is dark orange. It is a warm neutral color that represents friendliness and dependability. Brown is great with red, orange, and yellow.

Silver is cool like gray, but livelier. Like gold, it symbolizes wealth, but with less warmth. It is a great accent for medium blue.

White is purity, cleanliness, and innocence. It is also whitewash, whiteout, and white flag. White is not a good choice for large areas of your cover online because it may blend into the background.

Gray is neutral, cool, formal, professional, and sophisticated. Gray goes well with any of the combinations above.

Black is the ultimate neutral background that goes with all colors. Like gray, it is formal, professional, and sophisticated.

Hopefully, I have provided enough information to inspire an appropriate color combination for your cover.

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