Colour

Colour is one of the designer's best tools.

There are lots of ways to use it to help communicate a message.

Colour can carry meaning, express personality, differentiate, frame, and highlight content.

Guidelines for using colour

Apply a colour scheme

Visually appealing web pages need a consistent colour scheme. Without colour, a page can lack personality. With a consistent and balanced colour scheme, a page can have a consistent and balanced personality. Too much colour, or erratic colour, gives a page a confused personality.

A colour scheme often refers to a consistent system of matching hues. It might alternatively mean a way of using colours, which don't necessarily belong to a family of hues.

For example, Apple.com uses different colours in different sections, but the colours are used in a similar way. In this case, the consistency derives from the treatment and application, rather than the colours themselves.

Example of not enough colour

Starbucks' home page is seriously lacking in a colour scheme.

Its grey background is inert and looks totally utilitarian. The brand is very much about lifestyle, as Starbucks' store design portrays, but the web site totally lacks any character.

Use enough colour

Using too little colour risks looking boring or inert. Colour is a good way of identifying, grouping or differentiating elements. It's cheap (especially when applied through Cascading Style Sheets) If you use too little colour, you have to use other means to draw the eye, to differentiate and give meaning to elements.

Leave white space

White is the best shade for reading text against. It is conventional to place have content areas against a white (or very light-coloured) background. White areas quickly stand out to the scanning eye as likely content areas.

Use your lightest background for main content

I'm going to stick my head out here and say it outright: white is the best colour/tone to put your central content on. The lightest tonal area on your page should be your content area, because that's conventional and what the brain expects.

Example

See http://www.pixelgraphix.de/. With the default stylesheet, the main text is displayed in very light grey boxes against a white background. Notice how your eye doesn't want to settle on the grey boxes - it wants to look at the white for some reason.

Original

Switched

The homepage for Irish broadband service provider HEAnet uses flat areas of white, but not for the content area. The content is against a not-quite-light-enough blue background colour. This makes it actually quite difficult to focus on the content.

Keep intense colours for attracting the eye

Intense colour attracts the eye, and the greater the area, the stronger the attraction. Too many intense colours attract the eye in too many directions, and the technique loses its potential effectiveness.

www.collegeclub.com uses a bit too much intense contrast and colour, which causes the eye to skip about.

The large area of intense orange in the middle of the page is the most attractive element, but doesn't contain high-value content. This is a design error.

www.guardian.co.uk also uses too many highly-attracting elements. The large number of bright red boxes confuses the eye, and the large number of heavy coloured boxes draws you away from the relatively light content in the middle of the page.

The web site of the RNIB (British organisation for the blind) is careful to employ sufficient contrasting tones to make all screen elements stand out sufficiently for people with moderate visual impairments.

The layout and colours fail in several ways.

The colour scheme is in disarray: The top-left logo area starts to use a good combination of greenish-blue tones. The rest of the page is dominated with a red hue, which does not sit with the blue.

Then, the strong yellow on the primary navigation bar adds a further primary colour. The problem is that primary colours don't go easily together.

The most intense, most contrasting, colour is the background to the secondary navigation bar. This attracts the eye first to a very low-value element, before even the site logo or any content.

Avoid juxtaposing intense flat colour with photographic imagery

This page for Harrah's Casino uses intense purple adjacent to a photographic montage. The intensity of the purple clashes with the subtle colours in the photographic imagery, making the colours seem dull and dirty.

Avoid using too many different colours

Lots of colour can look hyperactive or garish.

Some colours naturally go well together, some naturally clash, particularly when adjacent, which can create nasty effects on some screens.

This combination of colours clashes and is hard to read, also compounded by the tiny font.

Placing coloured areas adjacent to less-saturated or greyscale areas can look very smart.

Colour schemes inspired by Nature

Luke Wrobleski (in an article published on Boxes & Arrows) argues that so many corporate web sites use the same safe colour scheme that they're starting to look the same. He argues for more creative use of colour on web pages.

He says that, if we accept the benefits of working with layout conventions, and its inherent limitations, colour becomes a more useful and attractive way to differentiate designs.

Luke also proposes a really nice way of finding complementary colour schemes: using inspiration from Nature.

Corporate sites looking the same
(HP, IBM, Dell, Microsoft) From Luke Wrobleski's article

A sample prairie-derived colour scheme.

From Luke Wrobleski's article

A colour scheme drawn from the environment around Dublin.

From Luke Wrobleski's article

Limitations of colour: Colour-blindness

Some people (mainly males) have impaired ability to tell certain colours apart. There are several types of colour-blindness, the most common affecting red & green (they appear very much the same).

The implication of this is: You should not use colour (particularly red and green) to mark elements in such a way that a user needs to differentiate the colours to use the interface successfully. The W3C Accessibility guidelines state the following as a Priority 1 checkpoint (i.e. you need to comply with this requirement to claim ANY W3CAG compliance):

• Ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color, for example from context or markup.

A second checkpoint states:

• Ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen. [Priority 2 for images, Priority 3 for text].

Alignment

Alignment is another way of creating associations between visual elements, which help users quickly understand the relationships of objects on a page.

Alignment works by visually associating a number of elements. When you see a number of aligned elements, you instinctively believe that those elements are peers of each other, or share some other common property.

This is a really useful tool for quickly letting a user know what they're looking at by instantly spotting relationships between different elements.

Properties of alignment

Alignment works on any screen elements: paragraphs of text, images, buttons, pictures, links, even combinations of all of them.

Although aligned elements are often grouped spatially, they don't have to be. Alignment works across the entire screen, even when the axis is broken by another element. However, arranging elements in a line or grid is stronger because it also benefits from grouping.

Top-edge and left-edge alignment are stronger than right- or bottom-edge alignment, because of the natural flow of the cascade. Groups that are aligned by their left or top edges seem to be more important than they would be if right- or bottom-aligned.

Alignment axes that start near the origin (top-left of the screen) are superior to those that sit further right or further down. This is a useful way of indicating a visual hierarchy, particularly when you have too many elements to arrange into a neat cascade. See the first example screenshot below. Spot the top-level navigation links that are only associated by their alignment axis. The second-level links sit along an axis that starts further out from the origin. This makes them inferior to the first-level links - even if they were above some of the first-level links.

In this example, the 2nd-level links (Warranties, Car preparation...) are still inferior to all the top-level links (HOME, ABOUT, CARS FOR SALE).

Although the L2 links are superior to the CARS FOR SALE link, it is associated with the higher first-level links by its alignment axis. Because that axis goes nearer the origin than the L2 link axis, all the elements that sit on it are superior to the members of the L2 axis.

Grids

Grids are a really useful tool for page design, and for forms especially. Once you find a design that seems to work because it uses strong and complimentary alignment axes, you can take the grid made by those axes and re-use them on other pages. Re-using layouts based on common (invisible) grids can strengthen a site's consistency.

This is design company gpin.co.uk's homepage (75% scale). I find the excellent top image instantly appealing, but the page is really hard to work out, due to chaotic layout.

I think that one way to make this design far more useful would be to apply a simple grid-based layout.

A simple example

In this example, there are four alignment axes at work:

• There are three top-level navigation links (Home, Cars for Sale, About)
• "About" also contains a group of six other links. While they could arguably be viewed as either first- or second-level links, they are clearly distinguished by the fact that they attach to a separate invisible axis.
• The text in the main body is all left-aligned, which clearly unifies the paragraphs.
• The footer links are unified by top-aligning to the same horizontal axis.

The same image, with alignment axes marked

A more complex example

• There are at least 10 alignment axes in effect on this page.
• Note the 3 product ad panels towards the bottom. They have no common alignment, which suggests a weaker link than the 'Marketplace Areas', for example. In the absence of grouping by alignment or containment, they are associated by repeating a style.

Example of insufficient alignment

• The main content boxes are not aligned, either by their left edges or top edges.
• It's impossible to guess which of the boxes will contain the main content, which might contain secondary information, or which you would look at first.

Planning Your First Web Site - Your Site Structure

Planning Your First Web Site - Your Site Structure

Planning your first web site can seem like a daunting task, and in a way, it is. Careful and practical planning can make the job much easier - not to mention, more fun to boot! The second step in your design plan should be deciding your site structure. In the first step (Part I of this series) , you were advised to list the contents of your sitemap. This is critical, since it will lead you to decide on the structure for this listed content.

Site Structure is your Foundation

The best way to begin to develop your site structure is to make a prototype of the folders and pages that you will include on your site on your computer's hard drive. For instance, if your site is intended to showcase your art work, you might create a new folder on your C drive called Junes_gallery.

Using the image at the right as a guide, create a folder within the first folder (e.g. Junes_gallery) for each major section of your planned site. You can see in the image that there is a folder for About the Author, Links and Awards, a main Gallery folder with three individualized folders within the Gallery folder: Oils, Watercolors, and Digital Art, and the main Index page that is placed on its own within the the main site folder. This index page is the first page that anyone who visits your site will see. Within each of the folders and subfolders, you will place the individual pages, graphics, multimedia, sounds, Flash movies, .....whatever you decide to put on your site. It is VERY useful to create this sort of structure and place each graphic, page, etc. in the appropriate folder while you are working on the development of your site. This not only helps you be organized, it also facilitates previewing the site as you work on it, and in the final uploading of your work to your web hosting server. This sort of organized structure on your own computer also acts as a ready to access backup to your web site. It is not unheard of for a site to be damaged, hacked or for some other reason dumped from a system. If you have it stored on your computer, and especially if you work on any additions, revisions, or editing from those same folders over time,...you can instantly repair or even upload your entire site again within a few minutes using a reliable ftp (file transfer) program.

This first step should be followed, whether you are building your site by hand coding the html yourself, using an html editor like Dreamweaver or Coffee Cup, or even a built in html editor available on many web hosting servers. It is always a good idea to keep a copy of all of your coding in this computer based folder system, even if you use a free web service where you can use prefabricated templates, such as Geocities. It is not being paranoid to back everything up!

You may also wish to create a folder called Images to upload all of the images you use on the entire site in one uniform folder. Likewise, you might also want to store other similar files such as sound files, documents, newsletters, and so on in their own separate files. It is up to you. The key is to visualize how you want your site structured, and create the structure on your computer to set up a workable folder space to organize the various pages you will develop.

Once this is done, you can begin to work on your navigation, and deciding the name of and number of pages that will be included in each of the major sections. Part III will help you with these next steps.

Learn Photoshop 06

The girl at the disco


Begin with the fact that the dimensions of this new file will be 500x400 and a resolution of 72dpi. Now we’ll take the girl’s photo and cut out the background, using the instrument (Eraser tool).







Now in this file, with a click on the right button of the mouse choose Blending options. Choose Color Overlay and set out the black color. Now the girl became a silhouette.



We’ll transfer her in our new file, which we created at the beginning.



Choose the instrument Gradient tool and set out the colors, a dark-blue (Code 03030c) and alight-blue (code 1b1ca3). Then looking for the red pointer in the picture we’ll paint another background, which will be placed under the girl’s background.



Now we have to create the rays. Using the instrument Point tool we’ll set out 3 points, like it is done in the picture. Color code (a8a8f6). This ray will be situated above the girl.



The same way we’ll do the rest of the rays. The rays’ colors you may use from the picture.



Now it’s time to create the girl’s highlight. You should make it this way. We’ll double the girl’s background and give to the duplicate a color (code c6c6f7) and place it under the original one, move it to the left about a couple of millimeters. Now on this background we’ll create another one – a mask – background, like in the picture. Then we’ll chose the mask – background and using the black – color brush, we’ll delete the right side of the girl’s highlight. Like in the picture.



We’ll set out more rays and that’s what we got.



If you wish you may add more stars, using the instrument (Custom shape).



The final result:




Download: Source File

Planning Your First Website - Picking Your Colors

Planning Your First Website - Picking Your Colors

An important part of designing your first web site is choosing your colour palette. Color is a big part of any website´s overall message, image, and "feel". Your palette should match the mood.Color is a big part of any website´s overall message, image, and "feel". Color is one of the first things to hit people when they visit a particular site. Why not use this attention to give a great first impression?

A site made with blue shades is going to be perceived differently than one with predominant reds or yellows. Wise web designers learn basic color theory and apply the principles to their online creations. Of course, how someone perceives a certain color is open to individual interpretation. Depending on our personality, culture, perceptions, experiences, and so on - we may well assign different meanings to colors than another person would.

There do seem to be common meanings attributed to colors - ones that color therapists use in healing, in environmental planning and in design. Knowing these meanings can put you ahead of the game when choosing the ambience and mood for a particular website. Color is one of the first things to hit people when they visit a particular site. Why not use this attention to give a great first impression?
The Institute of Color Research informs us that "research reveals all human beings make a subconscious judgement about a person, environment, or item within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone."

Basic Color Theory

Color theory focuses on how color manifests on the spectrum. Color psychology goes one step further to assign common meaning or moods to specific colors. We can explore these by discovering the meaning of primary, secondary and tertiary colors - the most common colors used on the web.

Primary Colors

Primary colors are the three pigment colors that can not be mixed or formed by any combination of other colors. All other colors are derived from these three: red, blue and yellow. Each of these pure colors stir up different moods and feelings in a viewer.

Red - hot, fire, daring, lush, aggressive, power, excitement, dominating, warning

Blue - peaceful, water, calm, wisdom, trust, loyalty, dedication, productivity

Yellow - happy, sunny, cheerful, alert, concentration, bright, warm, creative, playful

Secondary Colors

Secondary colors are formed by mixing two of the primary colors together. These mixed colors also evoke particular moods.


Green (blue and yellow) - pastoral, spring, fertility, jealousy, novice, youth, hope, life, money

Orange (red and yellow) - warm, autumn, generous, strong, fruitful, appetizing

Purple (red and blue) - royal, mysterious, pride, luxury, wealth, sophistication

Tertiary Colors

Tertiary colors are formed by mixing the secondary colors with primary colors.

• Yellow-orange
• Red-orange
• Red-purple
• Blue-purple
• Blue-green
• Yellow-green

Of course there is also black and white, very common colors used in web design. Black is the absence of red, blue and green light while white is the purest saturation of all three. Black and white plus gray are known as non-chromatic hues.

Black represents style, dark, mystery, formal, powerful, authority.

White - clean, pure, chastity, innocence, cool, refreshing.

Analogous colors are any three colors which are side by side on a 12 part color wheel.

Complementary colors are any two colors which are directly opposite each other, such as red and green.

Making your Palette Seamless

Colors are categorized into hues which when combined make up the color spectrum. Great web designers choose their main colors carefully, then combine variations of the hues throughout. As Christopher Schmitt explained "If you can carry a color scheme from the splash page to the exit tunnel, you´ll automatically create a cohesive look and feel for your sites". Sites that come off looking slick and well attended to incorporate color in deliberate ways. Matching the hues in background, titles, fonts, navigation tools and graphics is a big step towards a visually outstanding web environment. Changing the value of the hue used, combining a light value with a dark adds a sophisticated and harmonious look to a site. For instance, if you make a graphic with the RGB values of R=255, G=051, B=051, you can match this with a similar hex value for your text color, or #FF3333. Adding white to a particular hue changes its tint value; the addition of black changes the shade value. By carefully combining specific complementary colors in small doses to page areas that are intended to draw the viewer´s attention, a design can be easier to use and interesting to view.

Web-Safe Palette

Designers learn that out of the millions of possible hues, 216 are considered web safe. Lynda Weinman exhibits these colors plus their html code number and RGB values in a nicely arranged chart cluster. Colors on the web are always a mixture of R (Red), G (Green) and B (Blue). The R or G or B value can range from 0 to 255. 0 meaning the color value (eg the R) is off and 255 meaning the value is fully on. Every screen color has a value that tells the designer how much of the R, G and B is showing or absent. In html, Red, Green and Blue values are written as six digit hexidecimal coding - a combination of numbers from 0 to 9 and letters from A to F. Pure blue has a hexidecimal value of 0000FF, and so on. To ensure that your colors look the way you intend them to, it is smart to stick to the web-safe palette of hues. This is because browser safe colors don´t dither. Dithering is what happens when a color is not available in the web palette, so the browser tries to compensate by combining pixels of other colors to substitute. Dithered colors look rough and spotty: browser-safe colors stay smooth and even looking.

Match Your Color to Your Intended Mood

If you want to wake up your audience - to initiate action or stimulate emotions, a warm color scheme works best. Reds, oranges, yellows all do the trick. If your intended mood is one of calm, leisure, dignified refinement - stick with the cooler colors - blues, purples, greens. If your statement is bold and to the point sharp contrasting colors work well - like black and white; blue and orange. Let your colors mean what you intend to convey. Your choice of colors speaks volumes - why not make it say what you want it to say?

Planning Your First Web Site - Your Site Layout

Planning Your First Web Site - Your Site Layout

Once you have decided on your site structure, genre, colors and sitemap, it is time to choose your web site layout. There are a variety of ways to physically create your layout, from coding the html yourself to using an html editor software program that codes the html for you. No matter how you decide to code your layout, the actual design of the layout needs to be determined. The best way to get an idea of the type of layout you wish for your site is to a) look at quality sites for an idea of how sites can be successfully laid out, and b) to take out a pen and paper and physically sketch the layout you are envisioning.

The most common ways to lay out a site for uniformity, aesthetics, and sheer symmetry include the use of a) frames b) invisible tables and c) cascading style sheets. Frames, though still used by some web designers are considered passe, and are generally discouraged. Cascading style sheets are a wonderful new way to code a site's layout separately in a special file, then plugging in the content within various other files. But, for your first site, I recommend working with invisible tables to provide a framework for your content while keeping the table hidden from your site visitors.

The first thing to consider is the dimensions of your layout. Unfortunately, people use different monitor display resolutions to view the web. A small percentage of people still use a resolution of 640 pixels wide, which means your site would have to be very tiny to be completely visible on their screens. The common default width of most people's monitors is 800 pixels, which is still quite small. 800 pixels is currently the standard smallest size of screen resolution to create a website. Thus, it is recommended that your site should look good at an 800 pixel wide by 600 pixel height so that these viewers do not need to scroll to the right to view part of your site. More and more, people use a resolution of 1024 pixels wide or more. You will want your site to look good to these viewers as well. One useful action to take to do this is to define your layout tables in percentages so that they will accommodate any width. For instance if a table is laid out at 100 % width, it will fit 100% of an 800 pixel wide screen just as well as a 1024 pixel wide one. It is also a good idea to center the main table so that it falls nicely in the middle of the screen, no matter what resolution is being used to view your site.

The second step is to choose the table configuration that you will use to create your layout. Below, you will find four common, quite easy to create table templates that can get you started in the right direction. Details for four layout table templates are discussed below - click on the link for each to download a pdf file of each template, complete with an image of the table being created as well as the basic html code for creating each one.

LAYOUT TEMPLATE 1:



As you can see from the diagram, template 1 consists of three main "cells" made up of one long Header row at the top, with two equal size larger content columns below. This design is excellent for a site that requires frequent side images, supplemented with text content. The top header part can contain the title of the site as well as the navigation titles or buttons.

Click Here to download a copy of Template 1 and the html code to create it.

LAYOUT TEMPLATE 2:



Template 2 is a much simpler design with only two "cells" including a thin side column and a much larger main content column. This design is simple yet effective for a site that houses large amounts of text and/or graphics. The side column is perfect for your navigation text links or buttons, while the main column can house your content.

Click Here to download a copy of Template 2 and the html code to create it.

LAYOUT TEMPLATE 3:



Template 3 is also a very simple yet tidy design with three identical "cells" made up of three uniform rows stacked on top of each other. When you first create the template, all three rows will look equal in width and height, but as you add your main content to the center row, the middle cell will become much larger than the smaller top and bottom rows. This design is quite elegant when your content is arranged with a header at the top, and your site information in the footer. You can put your navigation links or buttons either in the top or bottom rows (some people put it in both places, especially if the page scrolls down for a screen or two.)

Click Here to download a copy of Template 3 and the html code to create it.

LAYOUT TEMPLATE 4:



Template 4 is one of the most common layouts on the Internet. It consists of one long header row, with a second row beneath which is divided into three columns. The left side column is usually used for navigation titles or buttons, the right one for content highlights, announcements, ads, or small images, while the middle one is where the main content goes. The top row is usually used for headers, search boxes, small ads, and sometmes a second navigation access area.

Click Here to download a copy of Template 4 and the html code to create it.

Once you have your basic layout coded, you can move on to begin creating your navigation scheme, specifying your colors, and plugging in your content.

Learn Photoshop 03

hree girls posing in the night Illustration

Let's learn how to create an illiustration. You can get your favorite photo and try to do the same steps.

Let’s create a new document with dimensions 500x400 and 72 dpi. Using the instrument , create a triangle (colour code is indicated with red).



Continue using the same instrument and create triangles on all the backgrounds - one triangle to one background:



All of them having the same colour:



Continue create triangles:
We’ll get the next picture.




On a new background create a nice star using this instrument :



The colour code is indicated again with red.



Make several stars of different dimensions, but of the same color.



And several stars of different colors:



We’ll combine our stars with the triangles and we’ll have the next picture:



We’ll add some luminescent stars using the instrument Blending Options where we’ll choose Outer Glow and set out like in this picture:



We’ll get luminescent stars:



Add some extra-effects. We’ll use a big brush of white color on a new background and make the upper part of the picture brighter. The brush’s dimensions: hardness – 0% and opacity – 10%:



Also we’ll dark out the edges of the picture by clicking the next instrument and choosing Curves on a new background:



The menu is open and we can install the next parameters. Seizing the left point from the bottom.



If anything is done correctly we’ll see the next:



Let’s take the girl’s photo and using the instrument , move off the background:



Applying Blending options and parameter Colour Overlay on the girls’ background set out the black colour.



We’ll get the girls’ silhouettes:



Add the girls’ silhouettes to the result we got before and we’ll see:



Add also a shadow under the girls. We need to copy the background with girls’ silhouettes and use Free Transform (by clicking the right button of the mouse on the background) and display the silhouettes on 180* vertically. Don’t forget to change the opacity – 55% on the background.





Download: Source File