Week 7 - “Imagine your blog as a white ball of healing light”
Ohm…. Ohm…. Ohm….
I’ve been thinking a lot lately on the topic of color. The blog that this is replacing was on the same general subject, but somehow I think I came across as being…. well, off-color if you’ll pardon the pun. My recent series of websites from this semester has lead me to the disturbing conclusion that I favor black backgrounds in all my works, leaving me with some areas of stickiness when it comes to choosing complimentary colors that won’t be too contrasting or hurt my viewers eyes.
My first few designs were pretty bad up until I started using CSS. This was a godsend. I could go back to my design, recolor specific areas of it, and have everything work how I wanted. I couldn’t code it on my own for the first three projects I used it on, but on the 4th one, I got it! Afterwards it hit me, once I started using the CSS, I favored black so heavily, that all my work was kind of hard to read. White letters just don’t show up well on a black background in additive color schemes. The backlighting just hurts my viewer’s eyes too much. Reds and greens however, show up very well on this kind of background, provided they aren’t too dark themselves. I was able to push it back to a forest green in some cases, or a deep magenta if the need arose. But never white. My one offshoot from this was a dark yellow. This kind of worked, but the theme for the website was spies, so I decided that it had to go. The only colors that would have worked in that situation were a pink (too girly) or a lighter purple (too dark). The resulting combination looked pretty good.
Another color scheme I’ve been looking into recently, was that used in the movie, video game, and book (well not so much the book, but the ideas were there). These colors, were things you would not normally want together, but in the context of the grody, anarchistic movie about losing oneself in an anti-establishment philosophy, it works perfectly because of the juxtaposition to contemporary design thought. Aged reds, pink, puke greens, paper bag browns, yellowed edges, green push on the frames, and cornflower blue, mix together to make a horribly wonderful kind of poor man’s industrial palette. I’d like to do something with those colors in the near future. I think I will…
In my Typography class, I used the wonderful artist Roy Lichtenstein in my ads, and I had to use primary colors for the whole thing because of the comicy nature of the art. In one ad I used yellow and red, and in another red and blue, all the time, aware that the colors had to closely match so as to not throw off the overall scheme of the work, allowing the art to match, but not oppose or camouflage the information which needs to be conveyed.
So what this all boils down to in the end, is that it should not be just preference that dictates your choice of palette. Subject material plays a very important part in choice, as does legibility and the orderly flow of information to the reader.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately on the topic of color. The blog that this is replacing was on the same general subject, but somehow I think I came across as being…. well, off-color if you’ll pardon the pun. My recent series of websites from this semester has lead me to the disturbing conclusion that I favor black backgrounds in all my works, leaving me with some areas of stickiness when it comes to choosing complimentary colors that won’t be too contrasting or hurt my viewers eyes.
My first few designs were pretty bad up until I started using CSS. This was a godsend. I could go back to my design, recolor specific areas of it, and have everything work how I wanted. I couldn’t code it on my own for the first three projects I used it on, but on the 4th one, I got it! Afterwards it hit me, once I started using the CSS, I favored black so heavily, that all my work was kind of hard to read. White letters just don’t show up well on a black background in additive color schemes. The backlighting just hurts my viewer’s eyes too much. Reds and greens however, show up very well on this kind of background, provided they aren’t too dark themselves. I was able to push it back to a forest green in some cases, or a deep magenta if the need arose. But never white. My one offshoot from this was a dark yellow. This kind of worked, but the theme for the website was spies, so I decided that it had to go. The only colors that would have worked in that situation were a pink (too girly) or a lighter purple (too dark). The resulting combination looked pretty good.
Another color scheme I’ve been looking into recently, was that used in the movie, video game, and book (well not so much the book, but the ideas were there). These colors, were things you would not normally want together, but in the context of the grody, anarchistic movie about losing oneself in an anti-establishment philosophy, it works perfectly because of the juxtaposition to contemporary design thought. Aged reds, pink, puke greens, paper bag browns, yellowed edges, green push on the frames, and cornflower blue, mix together to make a horribly wonderful kind of poor man’s industrial palette. I’d like to do something with those colors in the near future. I think I will…
In my Typography class, I used the wonderful artist Roy Lichtenstein in my ads, and I had to use primary colors for the whole thing because of the comicy nature of the art. In one ad I used yellow and red, and in another red and blue, all the time, aware that the colors had to closely match so as to not throw off the overall scheme of the work, allowing the art to match, but not oppose or camouflage the information which needs to be conveyed.
So what this all boils down to in the end, is that it should not be just preference that dictates your choice of palette. Subject material plays a very important part in choice, as does legibility and the orderly flow of information to the reader.
