Topic: site: colour scheme-advice?

Doing a page as a favor for a friend for his mother. I'm not a designer, I'm a code-monkey, HTML schematics aside (I havnt gone though to make everything all happy-happy-complaint, and I know, tsk tsk, tables instead of CSS, whatever)..

What I need help with is - picking colours.

--> page is up here : http://65.50.81.101/dfm/index.asp

the colours need to go along with the header and/or the blue thats in the navbar. However, they also dont want it looking 'too masculin', and keep an airy/feminine feel to it (then why they went with such a deep blue and require me to stick to it is beyond me....)

However, when using the various colour wheels on the net, all the complimentary colours/etc come up as rather grossish orangey-pastels, and while they work together, makes the site feel very 1980s attack of the pastel colour plate.

They havnt seen the current colour scheme up yet, but I /know/ they will complain that it looks too cold.

stumped here, any suggestions?

What's wrong with the current colors?
Why do you want to start with a table design and then make it compliant? I think that's the other way round...

But besides from this i put the some colors from your site through the gurus color wizard
First the '6a91b2' from the navbar. Take a look at the anologous colors they could be great for backgrounds. The tins and shades section is also nice. The lighter colors can be highlights or backgrounds. The darker ones could be used as text or headings. The saturation index will be useful for links. For instance the top one for unvisited/active and the number three for visited.
But you will need to eyeball it, play with it.

Also after some searching i found the '003663' from the top bar.
(which is declared twice in two different ways in the table).
again try some of the collors for yourself, play and see what works.

To make life a bit easier i suggest you to put all the colors in the stylesheet.
Then install the firefox browser with the Edit-css extension. With this you can easily cycle through all your selected colors while seeing the change directly. When you are ready save the css file and load it in your page.
You could even ask asks your friends mother to come over and let her say which colorscheme she likes.

------------------------------
Do something usefull: support Justice for Pat Richard

The first thing that comes to mind when I see the color scheme is "munanhada," which is unfortunately a Korean word. Literally, it means "no difficulties" or "safe." In other words, you won't have any problems with that color scheme, but you probably won't be inspiring anyone with it either. It could work for you if you wanted it to, but I'm sensing you want something with a bit more kick.

Rinswind has some good advice, but I'd like to move away from the mechanical aspect for a moment. Yes, color theory is a science, but it is also an art. Those color calculation programs that spit out values for you can be handy at times, but they can also leave you feeling cold and lifeless. At least, that's been my experience.

I realize that my site is very different from what you're doing here (if you want to see my site, you can click on the Liminality link in my sig), but I'll tell you what I do. If you look at my different styles, you'll see that each style has a photograph that plays a central role in the design. In fact, all of the main colors used in each color scheme were chosen from their respective pictures. I just used the eyedropper until I came up with combinations that I liked. The only colors I figured mathematically are some of the link colors (like the link colors in the Coastal and Buddha schemes, for example). And, to be honest with you, I am the least satisfied with those colors.

So I'm looking at the site, and I notice you've got a picture of a bunch of different kinds of lipstick (I'm looking again, and apparently the pictures are pulled randomly). You could snag some colors from that picture (this would most likely be a red-based scheme, and thus would avoid "cold" colors). Or you could go with some skin tones from some of the model photos. I'm not saying this is the best route to go here, but it can't hurt to experiment, can it?

Just thought I'd toss another line of thinking out there. Maybe it will help get your creative juices flowing...

[Edit: Oh, if you do visit my site, just ignore the "Bell" scheme. I currently hate that one, and I think I really struck out with the colors on that one. So it's probably not the best poster child for my "take colors from photos" idea. ]

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | Keeper of the Juicy Bits

(Edited by Suho1004 on 05-18-2004 14:57)

yeah, some of the work was just a result of lazyness, I realized I shoulda put the navbar colour into the style sheet.

as for not going for a pure-CSS design.I defiantly do see the usefullness in going pure CSS with some apps, and have done alot of fiddling around doing XML/XSLT/CSS driven designs for shits and giggles to 100% seperate content from display. But, for small quick 1-off stuff like this, I find it just becomes a headache and not worth the hassel. If I really had felt like geeking out, I would of put the list of services/prices into an XML file and pulled it all in from there with transformations for the services page and the sidemenu, but I got better things to do with my time

But, not sure which version you saw of the page when the comments were posted (its been continually worked on the past few hours/lastnight), but did finnaly end up with colours I liked, and adding the images to the front page added a bit more visual kick to it like she was looking for.

I actually agree with Suho here. The color scheme works and actually I quite like it., but it won't blow anyone away. But do you atually need to? In my opinon, no. I think it works good as it is. Just my opinion as a viewer.