I'm customizing a color picker's default showing colors which will be used as background colors. I'm wondering if there is a collection of the colors that are particularly useful in practical web design. Like nobody(hopefully) would use #f00 as a 100%-width page's background color while #fff is a universally usable one, there's DO'S and DONT's when it comes to picking background colors. So what are the candidates in your opinion?
I know this could be subjective, but generally I believe there IS a solid set of them.
[edit] : I kinda have an idea to customize the color picker in a logic way, first pick a buch of hues, them for each hue, start from the possible lightest of saturation to the possible heaviest. A bit demenstration:
gray [ #eee, #ccc, #ddd, .... ]
green [ ... .... ... .... ]
blue ....
yellow
brown [
As for a realistic answer, #fff won the race, right? Sometimes you'll see shades of gray, #eee, #eaeaea, and an occ. #000.
If you want to mix things up, I'd recommend checking out http://kuler.adobe.com/ to get an idea for what's popular, but perhaps slightly different. It's fun to experiment with the palettes up there.
I don't think there is a universal standard for picking up colors for your site. It entirely depends on the nature of the site and the kind of users that visit the site.
For eg: it would be nice to give a greenish color for a site that's theme is nature.
Here is a nice site in which you can choose color combinations and get a preview of that in a single click.
Color Scheme Designer
Never choose a color that will distract the user from seeing the actual contents of the site.
If you allow users to select the color then it would be nice to show them a preview of the site with the colors they have chosen.
Contrast is what really matters when choosing background/foreground colours, so they're likely to be very light, or very dark
so you'll need light and dark variants. i'd probably opt for:
light red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet
and dark as above
maybe the same for some earthy type tones, browns, greys, etc.
If you like colours like I do, you might visit ColourLovers. They've got some great ways of choosing colours, and colour schemes. The website trends section might be interesting to you.
I personally like schemes where the lighter colour is not pure white. Pure white can be sometimes harsh when reading lots of text.
Creativity is BREAKING the rules.
It is possible that a seemingly bad color combination, if used in right proportions, can actually look good, so there is no such thing as a bad color combination, it also matters on the shades, difference in colors.
Believe it or not, i own a site (www.salvin.in) where user can change the background color to many different choices and it still manages to look good *ahem in most of the cases.
There are a few things that i suggest you to look into:
Color wheel
Color harmonies
Triads and Tetras
Mono chromes (with contrasting shades)
Complimentaries
I find that #000 messes up my eyes. After looking at mainly #FFF pages/applications, then switch to #000, then when I go back to anything else, it take a while for my eyes to adjust. I vote "no" to #000.
Related
I am new to CSS and programming in general so I am sorry if this is a beginner question but I couldn't find a proper solution myself.
If I have a certain color code (HEX), e.g. #028dca, how can I get matching colors for this ?
I found a number of tools online but I only saw solutions that give me different shades of the same color whereas I need different colors that match the above hue etc., especially red and green - and a few more colors would be nice to have.
One of several examples I tested is the following but again I couldn't find a proper red and green tone there, just different shades of blue and orange as the complementary color (and it looked similar with other tools I checked): https://color.adobe.com
Can someone help me with this ?
Many thanks in advance,
Mike
Don't know actually what you mean with "couldn't find a proper red and green tone". Given a particular color, it has complementary colors... it's math.
Here is the one that I use: http://croma.numixproject.org
Try using Coolors.co
You can fix on colors and then try different palettes.
The one with the color you posted would be like this - http://coolors.co/app/86615c-f1a699-028dca-79065a-02241a.
You can explore more by hitting the spacebar
I like the "zither strings" that Visual Studio 2013 displays, that help visually align the braces in try / using / while / etc. blocks of code. I also enjoy them aesthetically, as they appear in different visual representations of points along the electromagnetic spectrum:
But, are those colors "more than a pretty face"? In the screen shot above, I see, from left to right, gray, teal, midnight blue, grey, gray, grey, gray, purple, and grey again. Is this just to help differentiate one line from another? If so, why are several succeeding lines the same hue (as far as I can tell)?
Or, do the colors signify something, such as teal for classes, midnight blue for methods, purple for while, and gr[a,e]y for everything else?
These are part of the Productivity Power Tools for VS2013 (see here). Specifically they are part of the Structure Visualizer feature.
There does seem to be some meaning in the colours. I haven't been able to find a definitive list of colours, but I've noticed the following:
Grey for general blocks, like namespaces, try / catch blocks and using
blocks. The grey for namespaces seems to be a bit darker than other block types.
Teal for classes
Blue for methods
Green for conditional blocks (if / then, switch)
Purple for looping blocks (for, foreach)
You can turn the lines on and off in the Productivity Power Tools section of the Options dialog.
Just interested in knowing if there are any good (and short! :-) ) articles which talk about the color combinations that would look good on a website.
i.e For tables (odd and even row), which one will be good in all situations
For alerts? For menus? etc
Thanks!
When it comes to colors, I don't think there are any set colors like you ask. There are no articles that say "ALL MENUS MUST BE BLUE!".
For alerts, either a light or golden yellow is used (so that you don't burn your eyes out), or a dark maroon or peachy pink for more prominent alerts. Menus can be any color, but they should match your color scheme.
I think what you are implicitly asking for are color schemes. Take a look at these resources:
Prefab color pallets for inspiration
Color scheme helper chooser
Aviary (Toucan) color chooser (flash)
Visibone color lab
Related articles
How color schemes work
How to choose a color scheme
How to select color combinations
In addition, if you are serious about your website, I strongly STRONGLY suggest reading this book:
Steve Krugs Dont Make Me Think
The book is in an easy to read (and skim) format, and is about colors, interfaces, buttons, and designing the easy-to-use website with lots of pictures and examples. For me, it was a quick read ( < 1 hr), and it changed my life.
simple advise : do not use many colors. select three or max four different color. and work with their shades.
for color scheme selections nothing beats...
http://kuler.adobe.com/
I know a lot of nice dark schemes for Vim which makes coding more readable and pleasant such as ir_black, wombat, zenburn. Its weird but I haven't seen so many popular light themes (white background).
Does anyone knows a light Vim scheme which makes code more readable and pleasant to see?
(that makes code less confusing to distinguish, something like Visual studio's default scheme?)
With all due bias-based disclaimers and caveats (I am the author of the color scheme), I find that Mayan Smoke both highly ergonomic as well as aesthetically pleasing (screenshot). Download page: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3065.
As alternative, you should also have a look at the immensely popular Pyte, which is eerily similar to Mayan Smoke (development was independent, and the similarity is convergence, I swear!), though the syntax colors are a lot more muted.
Check out http://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.html, it has a HUGE list of colorschemes with previews.
If you do not like C samples, there are samples with other programming languages, too: http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/
Louver is a bare-bones, light color scheme that somewhat resembles the default Visual Studio look.
Screenshot:
http://jstap.web.fc2.com/louver.html
I like Solarized for LCD monitors. It sucks on CRTs.
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3520
Screenshots at http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
This new theme is really nice, even with GVim on Windows:
https://github.com/reedes/vim-colors-pencil
I like dark background, but changing software a lot which like IE, VS studio .... So changing from dark to light and back is so uncomfortable, so light background is also my choice, I more prefer the theme name ironman, you can find it on vim plugin page.
You should try eclipse theme.
https://github.com/vim-scripts/eclipse.vim
Interesting subject and such contradictory statements. First: according to my experience, everything with dark background is very bad for my eyes, unless I work in total darkness. But you shouldn't work in darkness anyway, just turn the lamp on.
Second: for (my) eyes feels best the backround color which I would describe "light neutral gray with slight greenish tone". BUT: especially these colors are very different from one monitor to another (with same RGB value), for example these are "guibg" colors from my two computers' schemes: guibg = #E2E2D8 on one pc and guibg = #E6EDD8 on another. Despite the colors look very similar they have different values. So honestly, there is only one way to make it "good for your eyes" - just pick some good scheme and finetune the colors, especially this background color is important imho. Also you can set several schemes with bg color adopted to outer lighting conditions. So if you see a description like "this color scheme is very good for eyes", it's sort of bulls*it, since it really depends. But I'd certainly advise to avoid any dark schemes.
As for me, readability is high and uniform contrast of all syntax elements.
https://github.com/andbar-ru/vim-unicon
I'm not sure how to ask this but here goes.
I draw a filled coloured rectangle on screen. The colour is in form of R,G,B
I then want to draw text on top of the rectangle, however the colour of the text has to be such that it provides the best contrast, meaning it's readable.
Example:
If I draw a black rectangle, the obvious colour for text would be white.
What I tried right now is this. I pass this function the colour of the rectangle and it returns an inverted colour that I then use for my text.
It works, but it's not the best way.
Any suggestions?
// eg. usage: Color textColor = GetInverseLuminance(rectColor);
private Color GetInverseLuminance(Color color)
{
int greyscale = (int)(255 - ((color.R * 0.30f) + (color.G * 0.59f) + (color.B * 0.11f)));
return Color.FromArgb(greyscale, greyscale, greyscale);
}
One simple approach that is guaranteed to give a significantly different color is to toggle the top bit of each component of the RGB triple.
Color inverse(Color c)
{
return new Color(c.R ^ 0x80, c.G ^ 0x80, c.B ^ 0x80);
}
If the original color was #1AF283, the "inverse" will be #9A7203.
The contrast will be significant. I make no guarantees about the aesthetics.
Update, 2009/4/3: I experimented with this and other schemes. Results at my blog.
The most readable color is going to be either white or black. The most 'soothing' color will be something that is not white nor black, it will be a color that lightly contrasts your background color. There is no way to programmatically do this because it is subjective. You will not find the most readable color for everyone because everyone sees things differently.
Some tips about color, particularly concerning foreground and background juxtaposition, such as with text.
The human eye is essentially a simple lens, and therefore can only effectively focus on one color at a time. The lenses used in most modern cameras work around this problem by using multiple lenses of different refractive indexes (chromatic lenses) so that all colors are in focus at one time, but the human eye is not that advanced.
For that reason, your users should only have to focus on one color at a time to read the text. This means that either the foreground is in color, or the background, but never both. This leads to a condition typically called vibration, in which the eye rapidly shifts focus between foreground and background colors, trying to resolve the shape, but it never resolves, the shape is never in focus, and it leads to eyestrain.
Your function won't work if you supply it with RGB(127,127,127), because it will return the exact same colour. (modifying your function to return either black or white would slightly improve things)
The best way to always have things readable is to have white text with black around it, or the other way around.
It's oftenly achieved by first drawing black text at (x-1,y-1),(x+1,y-1),(x+1,y-1),(x+1,x+1), and then white text at (x,y).
Alternatively, you could first draw a semi-transparent black block, and then non-transparent white text over it. That ensures that there will always be a certain amount of contrast between your background and your text.
why grey? either black or white would be best. white on dark colors, black on light colors. just see if luminance is above a threshold and pick one or the other
(you don't need the .net, c# or asp.net tags, by the way)
You need to study some color theory. A program called "Color Wheel Pro" is fun to play around with and will give you the general idea.
Essentially, you're looking for complimentary colors for a given color.
That said, I think you will find that while color theory helps, you still need a human eye to fine tune.