choosing colours for web pages

April 11, 2004 11:45 AM

"Whether it is an impressionist masterpiece, or just wallpaper, if you take the colour juxtapositions and their proportions from nature, you won't go far wrong." Choosing colours for web pages.
posted by reklaw (10 comments total)

impressionists didn't take colours from nature. it's pretty much their defining trait. eg http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/impressionism/
posted by andrew cooke at 12:00 PM on April 11, 2004

Is it just me, or do all of the centre squares look the same?
posted by Orange Goblin at 12:02 PM on April 11, 2004

It's just you.
posted by sharksandwich at 12:11 PM on April 11, 2004

Check the homepage and repeat after me:

It's hard to read text of the same colour shade on a webpage. Perhaps that happens in nature, but my eyes hate it.

MS got it right with white on blue (old dos utilities and windows title bars). Also, for people who don't mind gaudy but very easy to read, yellow/amber on black works well. Green on black is OK, but seems to be too much contrast.

I guess I'm just not aestetic enough to be a designer. PH33R MY AVOCADO GREEN DESK!
posted by shepd at 12:33 PM on April 11, 2004

Very cool idea for choosing a palette. Thanks!
posted by scarabic at 12:35 PM on April 11, 2004

It looks like all this comes down to having a "source" for your design, which is a wonderful idea -- but I don't see why this source need be from nature. I could just as well design a web page based from anything aesthecially pleasing (a vase, an old map, my sneaker).

Orange Goblin, they all look the same to me. I get their point, but that illusion could have been much better illustrated with other color choices (any of the MeFi optical illusion links).

Not to discount the (quite interesting) original link, but: do they really expect me to take design tips seriously from a page that looks like that?
posted by rafter at 12:43 PM on April 11, 2004

Is it just me, or do all of the centre squares look the same?

If that's intentional, it's the funniest thing I've read today. If you're serious.... I'm.... I'm sorry.
posted by graventy at 3:27 PM on April 11, 2004

I'm serious..I know they ARE the same, but they aren't meant to LOOK the same, yet I see them as the same.
posted by Orange Goblin at 5:12 PM on April 11, 2004

I've been in desperate search for new color schemes and designs for my website and so have been doing this and things like it for the last year now. This article is a laborious rationale for one trick. Hilariously, the author gives no special attention to the most important part of doing something like this until the very last sentence. All things in proportion. Maybe there's another article about how to do this?

I shouldn't criticize, really. I'm not sure there's a way to simply teach the things I've been trying to learn. Books have been written on it and they mostly just have lots of samples for one to ingest. Proportions and aesthetics are matters of experience, experimentation, mistake making etc. Not the kind of thing one can make an easily digestible article out of.
posted by wobh at 5:37 PM on April 11, 2004

Hilariously, the author gives no special attention to the most important part of doing something like this until the very last sentence.

I agree. I wish he'd cut the first three paragraphs of his essay and start the thing with the fourth.

If anything bugs me about the substance of the essay, it's that the photos he's using are already carefully composed in terms of shape and color, which sort of gives the lie to the "colors from nature" premise. Instead you're picking colors from other artists, which usually works well. But it's got nothing to do with the intrinsic power of natural color or anything like that.

As far as I'm concerned, the design of the page is just fine, though I'd be real surprised if he used colors from nature when designing it.
posted by furiousthought at 6:45 PM on April 11, 2004