Web Designing: Color It RightWritten by Kay Zetkin
Color choices for your web design is, in a way, choosing not what color you feel like but choosing what’s appropriate, applicable and interesting for your potential users/audiences. You don’t want your users feeling pathetic of your web site’s color choices and patterns, do you? Planning and organizing your color usage as you go about designing your web sites should not be overlooked. Don’t just go about it with a trial-and-error attitude. Here are some of best practices with regards to applying color in web design. Read this and get a head-start in capturing eyes (if not yet their hearts and minds) of your prospective users! Regarding Use of Color and Pattern. Make it a point that your color choices are flexible enough that they can be easily replaced depending on your user’s browser settings and assistive technology. It is good to establish a strong contrast between background color and text color, however, lest you intentionally want your users to get dizzy, don’t use patterned or textured backgrounds behind texts. Solid and plain text backgrounds are well and good. On-screen patterns need to be put in center. Do not rely heavily on color connotations in guiding your users about important information. Color coding as an additional way to identify different elements and site navigation can be fun and amusing. But avoid using too many different colors simultaneously. Be consistent and have limitations in number of colorsyou’re your color coding. Regarding Choices in Color. The safest, more legible and professional – looking combination is black text on a white background. For maximum visibility according to average human eye’s capabilities – red and green turns out good when in center of screen; black, white, yellow and blue are very useful on periphery. If your intent is to identify two groups of content, do not use red and green combination, always consider that most common color blindness is that of red/green blindness. This precaution also applies with blue and yellow combination. Keep in mind that 1 – 2% of men have blue-yellow color blindness.
| | Paper’s Colors – Do They Matter?Written by Kay Zetkin
As a kid, I adored collecting lots of colored and scented papers. When I grew up, though practicality found its way in my mind. Now, I see papers as they are – to be used for writing and for printing… Printing technologies have allowed for many kinds of paper to be used. Have you ever visited a paper store? Yes, lots of paper there, of various shades, size and volume. White papers are even varied – as you may probably notice, too. There are white papers that have soft cream coloring, while others have soft gray, soft blue and even a soft pink aura about them. Once you view them separately, you’ll identify them as they appear to be – of a white color. The thing is, when you view them next to other white papers about, you’ll be able to detect easily that they differ very much in color. As always accepted and viewed professionally, most people want their official letters and other professional print jobs printed out clean on white paper. Aside from fact that it’s most common color, white paper also offers greatest amount of flexibility regarding paper weight availability. However, there are hundreds of colored paper stocks that might be considered, too. If you have a print job on run, does it matter what paper color you should use? And if yes, then what’s most important thing to consider when choosing a paper color? Actually, color of paper almost always affects whole print output. Depending on colored stock you use and prints you wanted. And most important thing to consider is what will be printed on paper.
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