[thelist] The use of color (was site header and logo)

[Ben Henick]

On Mon, 31 Dec 2001, Alliax wrote:

> Hello, thanks for both your and Ben's answers.
>
> Thanks to Ben who's found the RGB2HSV function:
> http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ncs/color/t_convert.html
>
> Heather, I was not interrested in getting the inverse of a RGB color,
> because I already worked the solution out, it wasn't that hard :-)

D'oh!  I remember making the same suggestion.

> But as far as my art theory goes, inverse colours are not specialy useful
> visually, except for black and white.. (perhaps I don't see the obvious
> usefulness of inverse colours?)

Actually, there is one that comes immediately to mind:  for high/low
brightness values, inverse colors provide good contrast.

The hard part is coming up with an accent color that fits both those
colors and the intent of your design.  If anyone here has undertaken
formal study of color theory as it applies to doing design in the Real
World, they've probably had some instruction on which accent colors work
well with a given pair of inverse colors.

> It was just that I recently heard of a complimentary color to each color,
> and I thought I could use that in order to create visually pleasing sites
> without choosing the base colour myself.

Erm, while intriguing I'm not sure what the application of such an
approach would be.  The associations made by a given culture with the
range of visible hues are often too strong to be ignored by any designer,
unless their intent is to deliberately "break the rules."  Perhaps that's
exactly what you're trying to do here.

When you factor in other considerations such as ambient light,
color-deficient visitors, and type usage, it quickly becomes apparent that
the traditions associated with applied color theory came into being for
excellent (and often entirely practical) reasons.

> Since I'll do it in PHP, I think once you have converted your RGB values to
> HSV, you have to do a rotation of the H angle, change a little bit (random
> offset) S and V values for not looking too rigid in the choice of colours.
> Then you'll have to convert back your new HSV values to RGB in order to use
> them in HTML table borders and likewise graphical elements on your page.
>
> from what I understood, the rotation of H angle should be 180°

...For complements, yes.

60deg and 180deg values suggest primary <=> secondary, while 30deg and
90deg suggest primary <=> tertiary and secondary <=> tertiary.

This concept applies just as well (if not more effectively) to RGB color
than to the other commonly used models; in a primary color, one channel is
predominant; in a secondary color, two channels are predominant; and in a
tertiary color there is an obvious mathematical relationship between *all
three* channels.

Before I go, I want to point out the following:

http://www.digital-web.com/columns/digisect/digisect_2001-04.shtml

which disucusses effective ways to use "official-looking" colors,
specifically those between green and blue.


-- 
Ben Henick
Web Author At-Large              Managing Editor
http://www.io.com/persist1/      http://www.digital-web.com/
persist1 at io.com                  bmh at digital-web.com
--
"Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?"
"I think so, Brain, but... (snort) no, no, it's too stupid."
"We will disguise ourselves as a cow."
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