Colors for the Chromatically Challenged
Thank goodness for Clagnutt’s Compendium of Color tools! I’ve been reading all the advice on color, but seemed to have no practical idea on how to get started picking a color scheme.
Getting off square one seemed to be the toughest part of the challenge without any design experience. The compendium’s tools seemed to get better with each click. The color blender was pretty helpful, especially after two or three mixes to get a good background color. Until now I was feeling lost looking at web-safe 256 color charts, and it always seemed that color # FFFFCC was the most subdued and least obnoxious.
Sitepro’s Coulour scheme chooser was a real gem. I used the colors I mixed as a starting point to find colors that would work well through the menu on the sitepro app. You’ve gotta love the slider bars as well!
The last bit of helpful advice was the use of the eyedropper to sample colors in photographs, etc. I loved the idea, and picked the color off several pictures, then input the hex # into Sitepro. This gave a great range of colors to pick from. Thanks!
Driving around the Block, checking out the Neighbors
It’s been fun checking out the blogs and type assignments this week. Clio 1 and 2 are making us more demanding. I made a suggestion to Marty on usability and connectivity between his blog and projects–I think we should all post links back to the student roster…I found myself clicking back a lot of times today trying to back out to Prof P’s student roster to check out the neighbors.
Several Type Projects are looking great. I had to leave a comment on Jenny’s blog because it looked great. I liked the color combo (glad somebody’s learning!) and thought the handwriting headings are great. I had an idea for Mark’s background and left a comment there, and wonder if anybody else got seasick from Tad’s opposite rolling background of tiles!? Lastly, Tufte gives some provocative ideas, but I commented on Jennifer’s blog that it’s tough to translate Tufte’s ideas into better PowerPoint!
February 27, 2007 at 9:36 am
Bill,
I also found the color tools helpful and this was an area where I assumed I would have little or no problems. However, I was surprised to realize that knowing what colors I wanted and what I actually came up with were not the same.
And, a big thanks for your helpful hint on coloring my CSS boxes so that I can figure out what I am doing. This idea really helped.