Typography
Design
Jeff Williamson
Northern Virginia Community College
http://www.nvcc.edu/home/nvwillj/html-design/
Color selection for the compleat doofus
Let's say, just for a moment, that you couldn't pick two matching colors out of a hat with only two colors in it. And let's say that you realize this - some folks just don't know and don't care how colors work together. Maybe I can help a bit. Those who are color savvy, please look away; this is likely to get ugly....
First: Realize that color is complex anywhere (ever tried to pick out housepaint?), and probably more so on the web.
Next: The safe bets for web color are the 216 colors of the browser safe palette. We doofuses appreciate not having unlimited choices - so pick from the palette.
Now, how do you match colors? There are formulae for figuring out which colors should go together - stuff about opposites on the color wheel and whatnot. I've never understood these or gotten good results.
Here are the rules I use, for what they are worth:
» You can get color matches by either choosing opposite colors, like NFL teams, or shades of the same color. Shades are easier. Most of my color combinations are shades.
» White always works and is welcomed; users like the feeling of open, light design
» Black matches everything but creates technical issues, particularly with trying to get text on black that prints well
» Most of the light colors and pastels in the web-safe palette are ugly; there aren't many good replacement background colors for dark text.
» Most of the hard, saturated colors in the web-safe palette are nice, if you have a design that can use them, such as light text on a dark background.
» A book of color combinations, like Hideaki Chijiiwa's Color Harmony, is helpful.