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or the April Design Lab column, I was planning a sequel to my last
installment, "Being Creative by Example,"
to further investigate the aspects of professional web design. The
subjects I wanted to discuss were color, certain modern graphics
trends, and the navigational interface principles. However, color
per se and its use on the Web appeared so inspiring a topic that I
considered a color study well deserving a column of its own.
We've already discussed some basic principles of working with color
in the logo tutorial.
Here, we'll take a more detailed look at some remarkable regions on
the color wheel and in the other two color
dimensions (brightness and saturation). Then, we'll consider
one special and very important case of color coordination, namely
the selection of background, text, and link
colors for web pages.
Contrary to many other treatises on the subject, I won't explain
here the color-related technical matters such as the non-dithering palette or converting
decimal numbers to hexadecimal. Such information, not surprisingly,
is more than abundant on the Web (this site being
no exception). Instead, I'll concentrate on color per se,
trying to figure out what makes color choice "cool" or "hot" or,
best of all, professional.
I realize that nearly all the observations and suggestions I'm going
to share with you are highly subjective, as is color perception in
general. No colors are inherently good or bad, and one person's
favorites are another person's allergy. Nevertheless, many colors
and tints do possess certain implications that are more or less the
same for all viewers. I'll try to show you the right way of thinking
about colors to help you select those which are the best at least
for yourself---which is a real chance to please your visitor's eyes
as well. (And to avoid teasing their eyes or even
making your message totally undeliverable, observe the color-related
accessibility
requirements.)
On the technical side, I highly recommend viewing these pages (and
the sites I refer to as examples) in high color or true color modes,
or you'll risk missing some of the most important points. As in
previous columns, some points are illustrated by numbered link boxes in the
margins. Color values are specified in the conventional #RRGGBB
notation of HTML.
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