Designing With Color From Design Star Challenge 5

By Vern Yip

Many people associate yellow with cheery and happy spaces, but it's important to select the right value for this color if you are going to utilize it in large quantity. Because incandescent lighting (the standard light bulb most of us are used to) tends to cast a yellow hue anyway, it's important to determine how yellow will be utilized in a space before picking its exact shade.

Temple chose to universally employ a mid-tone yellow on all of her studio walls, which can be difficult to live with everyday since a studio apartment offers no escape. The wrong tone of yellow can have the ability to reflect an unflattering hue on people and can make things seem a bit duller than they actually are. To successfully go down this road, a better strategy would have been to pick a warm pale/butter yellow for the walls that almost read neutral and accent it with several stronger, bolder yellows in pillows, drapery, rugs, artwork and bedding.