General Color Choice discussion?

They have: 160 posts

Joined: Mar 2002

The natis.com critique got me to wondering how you all choose a color scheme for sites etc.

Suggestions?

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What I generally try to do is choose one dominant color and then one color that is muted (added black or brown) or pastel (added white). Non standard colors are more complex and interesting to the eye for instance Maroon is more interesting than Red.

Use other colors only to call attention to something.

For example:
Main color Maroon
Sub color light brown
attention color yellow or green

A friend of mine gave me great advice. Look at the colors women wear in their clothing.

Interesting note: Women tend to have a color vocabulary at least 2x larger than men. Just take a look at lipstick and nail colors.

[email protected]

http://www.alogical.com

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nicora's picture

He has: 267 posts

Joined: Nov 2001

Generally speaking, most sites I re-design or sites that I brand myself have logos with 2-3 colors. Without going into the details on color seletion for logos/identities, I'll explain a little of how I come up with site color schemes.

I try to stick to the logo's colors, if I use new colors, they are a tone of an existing logo color, ie: add a little black or white. Any other variations normally include nuetral colors, mainly grey's. Another trick I use is patterns. Sometimes a pattern of colors in the logo array can add seemingly new "color's" to the page.

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

cordedpoodle wrote: A friend of mine gave me great advice. Look at the colors women wear in their clothing.

lol, can just imagine it "Honest sweety, I was only looking at her colours" Laughing out loud

JeevesBond's picture

He has: 3,956 posts

Joined: Jun 2002

Lol, what a great excuse...I'm going to try it, then refer my partner to this thread when she tries to tell me off! Laughing out loud

Most of the companies I work for have little or no branding, and therefore they don't have a logo (or the logo is black & white and/or sub-standard). If this is the case I will firstly design a logo for them - trying to encapsulate the 'feeling' of the business/organisation, and its members through colours and shapes - I then use the colours and shapes as a basis for a web site template.

This staged design is a lot easier than attempting to create a complex site from scratch...Especially if it goes wrong! In addition a logo takes a lot less time to create, also if a client doesn't like something it's very easy to change.

a Padded Cell our articles site!

They have: 20 posts

Joined: May 2003

you can check these sites out....they should really help you out:

some other links to cool ideas.
http://www.divasedge.net/cooltools/color.html

really cool....this is what I think you are looking for:
http://www.pixy.cz/apps/barvy/index-en.html

a link to select a colour and the codes required to call it up:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/color_codes/

Andy
DontFart.com
Don't Fart Around ...Find It Here!
(Coming Soon!)

They have: 160 posts

Joined: Mar 2002

Thanks for the links.

One thing though: I still try to stay within the web clut but I don't worry about it too much. Not too many people out there using 8 bit monitors anymore.

[email protected]

http://www.alogical.com

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