Painting with the Colors of the Wind(ows)

 (Okay so Blogger decided to throw this in drafts....I totally wrote it last night and realized this morning it wasn't there. Weird.)

WOO COLORS YEAH WOO. Okay now that that's out of the way....color theory. I feel like the color wheel intro is something that almost everyone's been introduced to at this point, but it definitely opens the discussion in a friendly and inviting way.

Color use on websites and for brands really is a huge, HUGE deal. The Alberts & Geese article's examples further prove that point. They took the same websites and utilized different color schemes on each of them...there's really no contesting the point they made. The website feels different on the premise of color alone. Color theory, meaning, and usage is such an integral part of design; but when it comes to websites, websites typically are a form of marketing...and in marketing that color meaning matters so much more.

The smashing magazine "Color Theory for Designers" article is a really great reference that I think I'll end up bookmarking for the future. Sometimes a designer knows their color meanings, they know the look they need to portray, and they still can't come up with the color scheme that achieves it how they would like to. The examples given in this article were really great representatives of each color and how they can pair with others to achieve different looks. I really enjoyed paging through the thumbnails here and considering each color scheme in turn.

Color theory was something interesting for me to see in action during my internship as well. The company I was working for hhad the professional, serifed dark blue logo of a "company that means business". When I began developing designs for our application I was still stuck in "my old ways", with rigid, fixed HTML and a design that felt almost too professional, to the point of losing a human element. I was asked by some of my co-workers and managers why I hadn't considered using the new branding the company was kicking off. My answer was more or less I didn't know that I was allowed to. Once I had the go-ahead, my whole view of the project flipped just by seeing the new branding. Gone were the dark blues and serifs; the company had switched to lime greens and plum with a custom font sans-serif logo. The switch inspired me to work on a more scalable, free flowing application that matched the vibrant spirit of the new company branding. This was where I began realizing I had a lot more to learn about HTML, and began rethinking my entire process - for the better. It's amazing how color theory can alter perception and meaning just like that!

Something really cool that I recalled seeing from a past class is this diagram from Information is Beautiful. The Visual Miscellaneum is a book that I've loved and wanted to buy for quite a while (and I see now there's a new edition so yay I must find it!), and this is a page from it describing how color is percieved in various countries of the world. It's quite interesting, and especially for the designer who has to consider an international audience it could be very handy!

"At the end of the day, pretty colors make people drool." — Nathan Rice