Neon Colors: The Origins, History, & Design Power

Exciting and extreme, glowing neon colors inject energy and excitement into designs. Now you can brighten your desired area with these tips and neon color palettes.

However, In line with a review of 1980s design elegance, artificially-inspired neon’s are considered by creatives to fascinate and grab the viewer’s attention and give plans a summery or nightlife-themed mood.

Find a range of thriving neon colors to use in print designs and digital design, as well as pick up tips for using bold and bright colors in your work. We will discuss in the article to find three cutting-edge neon color palettes stimulated by Miami sunsets, Indian festivals, and the world’s nature.

Hungry for more color inspiration? Discover this article and learn about the beguiling spectrum of colors to use in your designs with our new color tool.

Where Does Neon Colors Fall On A Color Wheel?

Luminous or neon colors are tremendously bright versions of primary and secondary colors, such as red, yellow, blue, green, and purple.

Bright colors fall apart from other types of colors because they release light, making them radiant. When the released light falls in the visual spectrum of light that the human eye can view, the luminescence is extracted in color.

Traditional artists’ color wheels that prelude in the 20th Century don’t feature neon colors because these super-glowy pigments were later created using chemical methods.

Even now, because neon colors have to produce light fluorescence, they are tough to achieve using standard print design procedures.

For instance, as CMYK is an additive color model, the patterns of colored inks “muddy” the ultimate color result. It produces fluorescence closely-impossible to attain.

To make neon colors in print, designers will repeatedly turn in its place to specialist pigments such as Pantone spot colors.

On digital color wheels’ neon hues are more widespread due to their composition, which is better suited to a light-releasing RGB color model. Now, ultra-bright hues are dispersed throughout as relations of their primary or secondary color relationships.

Types Of Neon Colors

The gas element neon essentially only yields a red-orange color, but the word neon can generally be applied to a wide range of luminous and ultra-bright colors.

There is a glowing or ultra-bright version of almost all primary and secondary color, counting:

Green: Electric Lime, Neon (or “UFO”) Green

Red: Electric Orange, Bright Red

Blue: Electric Cyan, Electric Blue

Pink: Neon Magenta, Neon (or “Plastic”) Pink

Purple: Purple, Bright (or “Proton”)

Yellow: Absinthe or Neon Yellow, Bright Chartreuse

Complementary Colors For Neon Hues

Ultra-bright forms of primary and secondary colors track the same balancing rules as their more subdued dealings. So, neon green combines well with neon magenta, as green is complementary to magenta.

Electric blue pairs attractively with electric orange, and neon yellow produce a surprisingly good teammate for bright purple.

Know The Meaning Behind Neon Colors

Neon colors assume some of the psychological traits of their linked colors. Electric blue can feel subtle and tranquil, much like pure blues, while neon pink takes on pink’s playful and fun features.

Though, the fact that neon colors are ultra-bright can alter their inherited traits.

For instance, while pure greens are related to growth and the environment, the artificiality of neon green strips these defining features away.

As a result, it’s more suggestive to use chemicals or digital, Matrix-stimulated code.

Because fluorescent colors are bright, bold, and artificial, they haven’t always been associated with good taste. While muted tones tend to have a chicer and intelligent status, neon hues are affiliated with frivolity, fun, and excess which is why neon colors are frequently used in club and bar products made by Hypemakerz.

Links with glowing signage further cement neon’s links with clubbing, nightlife, and cities after dark, mainly when associated with dark colors like midnight blue and black.

Neon colors can also be related to warning and danger because of their use in high-visibility clothing and signage.

The History Of Neon Colors

Bob Switzer first discovered luminous paint in the 1930s. After encountering an accident in other countries, he was directed to stay in a dark room.

To pass on the time, he played around with waving glowing minerals around in the air, which enthused his later experiments with mixing wood varnish and the minerals. The resultant product was named Day-Glo.

As preferably visible colors, neon shades have since been taken under consideration by signage and manufacturing clothing to either turn a viewer’s devotion to a warning message or escalate the visibility of people working on building highways, sites, or railways.

However, more subtle colors were preferred during the 1970s. Ultra-bright colors, containing hot pink and electric purple, characterized the 1980s, recognizing it the decade of neon.

Neon’s high visibility has also acknowledged it as a favorite among festival and nightlife fans. Even in the Acid House music movement of the 1990s, club-goers often sported a neon yellow smiley sign on clothing and waved glow-sticks in the air.

Neon-rave events are now widespread at universities and festivals, where attendees wear neon paint on their faces and bodies to attain a psychedelic consequence.

With the dawn of digital combination, neon colors originated into their own on the world wide web. Web designers were able to attain vividly devotions-grabbing colors on screens with very little effort, paralleled to the more trailed efforts of print designers.

A recent leaning towards major design and a revival of 1980s color palettes has all-in-all put neon colors back on the style map.

How To Design With Neon

Neon colors can brighten designs as well as appealing the viewer’s eye. When making websites or apps, neon can be particularly actual for making designs look convincing and clickable.

Teamed with black-and-white photography and a neutral palette of white, black, and beige, the selection of neon pink creates a statement about modern femininity.

Neon lighting is carefully related to fluorescent lighting. The light released by abstruse gases within a tube is used completely to excite fluorescent materials that coat the tube, which then polish their colors that become the tube’s visible, normally white, bright.

Fluorescent coatings and glasses are also a choice for neon tube lighting but are typically chosen to achieve bright colors.