Afraid of color

[Brak]

I don't know if any of you have noticed... but I'm just well, afraid of color It's no good... I feel like I can design fine in greyscale but once that horrible thing called color comes in and rears it's ugly face the stuff hits the fan...

I would greatly appreciate ANY advice for designing in color...


PS>> This guy rocks :Ogre:

[filburt1]

Blue and green is nice. Red is blinding, and any light-on-dark is bad.

I seem to recall a site that allowed you to pick what it thought would be eye-pleasing color schemes. Don't know it right now, but I'm sure somebody will post it.

[splufdaddy]

The Online Color Scheme Generator may be what you're talking about filburt. It's a great tool, I use it frequently.

[smoseley]

Get a book called "Elements of Color" by Johannes Itten. He was a professor at Bauhaus (a german design school circa 1925 that revolutionized all forms of art... from dance to architecture).

He pretty much INVENTED modern color theory. The book is only 80 or so pages, and has lots of pictures. Easy reading. Will change the way you see colors ;-)

[tha_Gsheep]

Is that the one that originally came with those big plates of examples? That book rocks man, wish they stilll did the plate edition one. Embracing colour will really help you become a better designer, a lot of people hang on one or two colour combonations once they find something that works but doing this will only stifle your creativity. I would also recommend that book but also check out a true pros tutorials here http://www.wpdfd.com

[Brak]

Thanks for the input - I'll keep an eye out for that book.. do you have any reccomended places to buy it? (I did a quick search on amazon and it came up $50+!)

Thanks for the input and keep it comin - I know I'm not the only one that has problems with color

[smoseley]

I don't know about color plates, but the Itten book has lots of color charts in it, demonstrating complementary colors and other color concepts like brightness, saturation, intensity, and other effects like perceived brightness, etc.

What it doesn't have is color effects specific to electronic media (monitors). I've got about 10 pages written on color concepts as they relate to web design so far. I'm still writing my stuff, though. I'd post it all here, but I'm hoping to get my stuff published one day, so I don't want someone coming off the internet and stealing it, if you know what I mean ;-)

[Brak]

I see, you'd rather have people not profit from your learnings Sorry... I just firmly believe in the idea of open-source everything... but I guess that's me

[smoseley]

It's not about that... It's just that until I finish everything and compile it and publish it, I don't want to leak any of it out so someone ELSE can steal it and profit on it !!!

I also believe in open-source, and will make my book available for free online (in non-printable PDF) whether or NOT it gets published !!!