Resources
> Frequently
Asked Questions
TopTechWriter's
Web-Safe Color Wheels • Misfit Web-Safe
Color Wheel
|
||||||
|
|
|
How
should I pick a color?
|
First think about the content that will be on the website you are designing and then decide which dominant (or most used) color would be appropriate. Figure out the basics first: should the site use more warm colors or cool? (A restaurant's web site might use great blocks of cheerful, exciting red, yellow, and orange hues, whereas a site selling medical supplies would probably opt for calming blues and greens.) For our example, let's say you were designing a site that sells baby clothes and that you decided on a color scheme using the lighter pastel shades found in the innermost two rings of the color wheel, You would start out by picking the dominant color from the wheel, then use the recommended complementary, triadic, and adjacent colors for variety. This method will give you colors that work well together, but as they're all going to be light pastel hues, you should also pick darker or more saturated versions of the colors in your scheme for pleasing contrast. If you're using a pastel shade of blue for large color blocks, for instance, you might want to use darker shades of the same blue color for text headings or for small blocks of color. You can also mix-and-match colors and saturations to keep your design from being too dark or light. If your dominant color is a dark red and the complementary color is a dark blue, try using a lighter shade of the blue color so your website won't be too gloomy. |
|||||
|
|
|||||||
|
Does
the world really need another web-safe color selector?
|
No, but then that's not what the Web-Safe Color Wheels do. They're unique because they don't just display color info for one color, instead they organize the web-safe colors into palettes that make picking colors by saturation or hue very easy. Then once you've got your color, it recommends other hues for your color scheme. (By the way, if you really are looking for a web-safe color selector, try the Color Picker.) |
|||||
|
|
|||||||
|
Can't
I just use Photoshop instead of your color wheels?
|
If you're one of the lucky ones with perfect color sense, by all means use Photoshop. But, if you're like most of us, once you've used Photoshop to select a color, you still have to puzzle out the other colors in your design. Photoshop won't help you do that, but the Web-Safe Color Wheels will. | |||||
|
|
|||||||
|
Why
web-safe colors? Aren't today's browsers able to display more than 216 colors?
|
It's surprising, but there are still incompatiblities between browsers on the major computing platforms when it comes to displaying color. If you use the web-safe colors, you can at least rest assured that they will display properly. | |||||
|
|
|||||||
|
Will
the Web-Safe Color Wheels still be relevant when browsers are no longer
dependent on web-safe colors?
|
When the web-safe color palette finally becomes obsolete, it won't really affect the Web-Safe Color Wheels (although I may change the name). That's because they were created to help people who don't have a strong color sense to pick colors that work well together. With more than 200 colors to choose from, you can do some pretty sophisticated designs with the web-safe palette--the Web-Safe Color Wheels just make it easier. | |||||
|
|
|||||||
|
What's
next for the color wheels?
|
The next revision (Summer, 2005) of the wheels will fix adjacent-color inconsistencies in some colors in the third and fourth rings (counting from the outside ring). By Fall, 2005, I will have added tetradic color schemes (similar to the triadic scheme except that they will consist of four colors spaced evenly around a ring instead of three) and monochromatic schemes that use a single color with different saturations to provide variety. Eventually the wheels will be redesigned as Java or Flash projects to make them even more user-friendly. That probably won't happen before 2006. |
||||||
|
Site
Map • Search
•
Disclaimer
•
Privacy
|
|||||||