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06/16/2003: "Color Challenge"

I recently designed a website with five sections. Each of the five sections had its own color scheme made up of five harmonizing colors and, since the user had reason to occasionally navigate quickly from one section to another, it was necessary that the section's color schemes be harmonious with one another. We needed to be prepared for the broadest possible audience in terms of hardware and software so we had to stay with the 216 color, browser safe, palette to avoid colors shifting.

where do you look? There's a very cool site called VisiBone that has a color lab for dealing with exactly what you're up against, looking for something to "see". The 216 color Web safe palette, I like the largest view, is displayed on the page with the colors arranged like a color wheel. Every time you click on a color, a box filled with that color appears on the screen, and then when you click another color, it too appears in a box, this time wrapped around the first box, and so on. Click and look and you will "see".
It gets worse, sometimes you have to match screen colors to the actual colors of products, but this was bad enough. In some cases there are logos, brochures or some kind of color identity to fill on a few of the blanks but here we had free rein and sometimes freedom can be scary thing. It seems that the more you look for help in the form of color theory the less you can "see". And, "see" is ultimately what you have to do, Cricket.

When you have wasted all the time you can afford and you have to make some decisions your sight will return, thank God. Now, when you get what you want, you can read the hex color codes right off the boxes and code them into your web page. Click and check it out, VisiBone.

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