Design Crossover: Paint Chips Online
I love HGTV. I love decorating and choosing paint colors and buying accessories. To my great delight, it’s finally time for us to decorate our kitchen/sitting room area. I was inspired by a gorgeous throw we got from Maureen, and after a few iterations of paint color choices (the first pair of yellows we chose clashed with the blue-gray marble, for instance), we’re finally settled on a color scheme: Adriatic Sea (blue), Fortrace (gray), Ranch Red, and Crushed Pearl.
But I didn’t let my color fancies go to waste. I now have five AcePaint booklets and a slew of paint chip panels on file in my office, because I had a fabulous revelation last week: home decorating tools are a great tool for choosing website color schemes.
I don’t have the time, money, or inclination to redecorate our entire house every three months, although I have enough different decorating schemes filed in my head to make it possible. Happily, I have a creative outlet for all those colors and textures: websites!
I’ve always been a fan of good color use on the web — I love programming, but I don’t share the gray-and-pale-blue aesthetic that seems to comprise many programmers’ entire color palette. And now I have another source of ideas that will help me get hesitant clients excited about a specific (and attractive) color scheme.
Anyone looking for a Spun Gold/Flower Pot orange/Hay Market green/Veradale green website?
Clyde said,
September 30, 2007 @ 2:48 pm
I would love to see more color schemes used in websites as well. The only problem I see is that web colors are just so limited due to the way monitors reproduce color (at least the “everyday” monitor - I don’t personally plan on spending $10K and sitting in the dark with the Photoshop gurus). On the sites where I’ve had input on the color choice, I’ve found that choosing colors outside of the black, white, and blue range ends up causing some kind of really weird combination and/or readability concerns. For instance, I love the visual appeal of some sites I’ve seen that use a black background to allow for the use of colors that really pop but I can’t stand reading white text on a black background. Unfortunately it seems like if readability is high on the priority list, which of course is somewhat necessary, the overall color scheme has to be limited.
Clyde said,
September 30, 2007 @ 2:50 pm
By the way, I love HGTV too! It just irks me when I go out and can never seem to find all the stuff I need for a project in the right shades like they’re able to! LOL!
beth said,
October 3, 2007 @ 11:32 am
I tend to favor black-on-white text as well, although light-on-dark can work too if done properly. Maybe I’ll take a look at website color schemes in a future post…
And I totally agree about HGTV! Funny how they *always* spend $999 on the $1000 budgets. A little suspicious, if ya ask me…