Color Theory
By Oli
At 4:32 PM · Wednesday, 17 September · 2003
To Design
I’ve been working on a decent color scheme for this site, but felt the lack of any formal color theory education. Here’s what I found:
- Web Graphics for Non-Designers from Glasshaus
While aimed at beginners, the excerpted Chapter 2: Using Color is a great overview of color. It introduces primary, secondary and tertiary colors, and defines terms like hue, saturation, shade and tint. It covers various color schemes (monochromatic, complementary etc) excellently, giving screen captures from applicable websites. It also mentions various color issues, like the 216 ‘web safe’ palette, PC/Mac gamma differences, and best strategies on taking color to the web.
If you like the writing style, the book is available from Glasshaus (who have returned from hibernation!). Webreference.com also has some other interesting links on color.
- Worqx.com’s Color Theory Overview
- This is an excellent and well-researched introduction to color theory. It’s written from an art perspective, and has a brief historical background to art theory. It’s well illustrated, and includes screen captures of websites showing various color schemes. There is also a list of resources, including a bibliography.
- A List Apart’s Color Your Web
- A short introduction to color theory, covering all the basics quickly.
- Kodak’s Digital Learning Center: Digital Color
- An introduction to color for people new to digital photography. It’s well-illustrated and covers a lot. There’s little in here on color theory, but it’s a good background read for a beginner.
- Lynda Weinman’s Designing Web Graphics.4
- This book looks great, covering color (and quite a few other things) from the perspective of web design.
- Color Voodoo
- These books, especially Color Logic and Color Logic for Web Site Design look interesting, but the examples give me flashbacks of PowerPoint presentations from 1996. They definitely look like introductory books.
I’m planning to follow this up with a look at online color resources for web designers, plus hopefully information about designing for color-blind users.
As an aside I’m having a hard time spelling “color”. My overwhelming desire is to use the ‘British English’ colour I was taught, rather than the somehow-wrong ‘American English’ color. However almost all color tools and information I’ve seen on the ‘net is written as “color”. I’m also used to CSS’ use of the Americanism. So rather than use the American spelling when quoting things and the British one when writing, I’ve succumbed to ‘American Kulcha’. Ick ;-)
