Negatives: Warning, danger and cheapness

Purple - color of nobility Purple combines stability of blue and energy of red. Purple is associated with royalty. It symbolizes wisdom, dignity, independence, power, nobility, luxury and ambition. According to surveys, almost 75 percent of pre-adolescent children prefer purple. Purple is a very rare color in nature leading people to consider it to be artificial.

Negatives: Cruelty, arrogance, mourning, profanity, exaggeration and confusion

Beige and Gray - color of neutrality As neutrals, they can be used in combination with almost all colors and still work well visually. Lighter hues of each make for good readability and backgrounds, but you must use hints of bright color or else you website can lose any visual pop or visual interest. Gray works well in office environments and promotes productivity and stimulates creativity.

Negatives: Apathy, dull, drab, monotonous, somber and smoky

Brown - color of reliability Solid, reliable brown is color of earth and is abundant in nature. It implies simplicity, reliability, earthiness, comfort and durability. Be careful as brown can be perceived in much same way as beige: dull and drab. Men are more apt to say brown is one of their favorite colors. Maroons go well with this color and speak to professionalism, like rich dark leather.

Negatives: dirty, drab, sad, boring and unwanted

Black - color of sophistication Black speaks to power, sophistication, formality, elegance, wealth, mystery and style. Black can make color burst from web page, especiall if it is a bright color. It is a natural classic color and never goes out of style. Too much black can darken a mood and affect emotions very easily. When designing for a gallery of art or photography, a black or gray background can be used to make other colors stand out.

Negatives: Death, unknown, fear, dark, sad, threatening, wicked, morbid and dangerous

The color of success We take every part of our design process seriously and few things are as important as your choice of colors for your website. Colors have a larger impact on your viewers than any other part of design and can affect your site's success. Color is immediate, emotional and memorable. If you have a website, try this simple test. Look at it for a few moments and write down feelings and words that come to mind. If your colors aren't telling you same story as your content it may be time to look at changing your color scheme.

Shell Harris is the Art Director at Big Oak Website Design. He provides proven results for Website Design & promotion. More articles can be found at http://bigoakinc.com/seo-articles/seo-articles.php

4. Repeat step 3 for 2nd, 3rd, etc. most prominent colors in image. Depending on how many colors you need for your color scheme, you'll know when to stop (hint: too many colors can make your designs look confused and messy).

Converting Decimal to Hexadecimal:

The RGB three color values that you picked up in your paint program may either be in decimal (0 to 255) or hexadecimal (00 to FF) - most paint programs tend to use former. If you want to use your colors in HTML code, you'll need to convert three numbers into hexadecimal, and put digits in order RRGGBB.

A quick way to do this is:

1. Start Windows calculator.

2. Make sure that it's in "Scientific" mode (on View menu).

3. Make sure "Dec" radio button is selected.

4. Enter a decimal number.

5. Click "Hex" radio button, and note down value. If value is only a single digit, add a leading 0.

6. Repeat steps 3 to 6 for each of three numbers in your triplet of RGB values.

For example:

R (decimal) = 194, converts to C2 (hexadecimal) G (decimal) = 15, converts to 0F (hexadecimal) B (decimal) = 140, converts to 8C (hexadecimal)

Therefore color to use in HTML code is C20F8C.

Manual Conversion To Color-Safe Palette:

I promised earlier that I would tell you how to manually convert a color into a color-safe value if your paint program doesn't have a built-in function for this. Here's how:

1. First, for your color, you need triplet of Red, Green and Blue values that we've talked about throughout this article.

2. For each of three values, you need to convert them separately into their color-safe equivalents.

If you're starting from decimal values:

0 to 25 - converts to 0 (decimal) or 00 (hexadecimal) 26 to 76 - converts to 51 (decimal) or 33 (hexadecimal) 77 to 127 - converts to 102 (decimal) or 66 (hexadecimal) 128 to 178 - converts to 153 (decimal) or 99 (hexadecimal) 179 to 229 - converts to 204 (decimal) or CC (hexadecimal) 230 to 255 - converts to 255 (decimal) or FF (hexadecimal)

If you're starting from hexadecimal values:

00 to 19 - converts to 0 (decimal) or 00 (hexadecimal) 1A to 4C - converts to 51 (decimal) or 33 (hexadecimal) 4D to 7F - converts to 102 (decimal) or 66 (hexadecimal) 80 to B2 - converts to 153 (decimal) or 99 (hexadecimal) B3 to E5 - converts to 204 (decimal) or CC (hexadecimal) E6 to FF - converts to 255 (decimal) or FF (hexadecimal)

For example:

If we need to convert C20F8C to its closest color-safe equivalent:

- We would convert C2 part to CC - We would convert 0F part to 00 - We would convert 8C part to 99 - And thus we would CC0099 as final color.

About Author: This article was written by Sunil Tanna of Answers 2000. For more graphics tutorials, tricks and tips, please visit http://www.graphicsacademy.com/