|
 | I love color. Color can affect the mood of a website without making any other changes. A bright, primary color palette evokes strong feelings while one that uses more neutral colors can calm and soothe. On the web we can change the color of our text, our backgrounds, our images, even the scrollbar colors in certain browsers. This week's special issue is all about color in web design — how to use it, color theory, and even how people perceive it. Please forward this newsletter, in its entirety, to your colleagues, coworkers and friends, anyone you think would like to learn more about web design, HTML, and web development. | |
Color Theory
 When working with color it's important to know whether you are thinking in paint colors or in computer colors. On the computer, the primary colors are red, green, and blue (RGB), but in paint or art color theory uses red, yellow, and blue (CMYK in print). These three colors are the primary colors, and along with white and black you can create all the colors imaginable. Color theory is a way of relating colors together that look nice and harmonize well together. If you understand color theory you'll be able to create designs that look good because the colors work well together.
| Color Symbolism
But understanding how colors look together is only the first part. Before you splash your page with color, you should understand that colors mean different things to different people. There are different preferences for colors by age, class, and culture. (You can get an idea of some of the vast differences in cultural perception of color on the Visual Color Symbolism Chart by Culture.) Plus color, like all other aspects of design, goes through trends where certain colors are more popular than others. (You can see this quite clearly by viewing a site like Colour Lovers — right now, faded warm colors seem to be popular.)
| Color and CSS
 CSS is where you go to set the colors in your design, but there are many ways to do it. You can use color names, color numbers in RGB, hexadecimal colors, and even define your colors as a percentage of Hue, Saturation, and Lightness (HSL). Plus, along with HSL colors, CSS3 also introduces transparency in your colors, so you can define RGBa colors or use a transparent keyword to define the opacity of your color blocks and images.
| Designing With Color
There are so many things you can do with color. You can change your text color with the color property. The background-color property lets you change the background color of any element on your page. You can create colored borders with the border-color property. Plus beyond CSS, you can affect your design by using specific color families. Color is important to web design, and knowing how to use it is critical.
| |
| | Web Design / HTML Ads
| | | | Featured Articles | |
| | | More from About.com | | | | | | Bake Sale Bestsellers
Make your next bake sale a profitable one with these irresistible recipes. More>
| | | | Real Recipes app
Download our highly-rated app for free recipes and kitchen tools, for iPhone and iPod Touch. More>
|
| | | | Sign up for more free newsletters on your favorite topics | | | | You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribed to the About.com Web Design / HTML newsletter. If you wish to change your email address or unsubscribe, please click here.
About.com respects your privacy: Our Privacy Policy
Contact Information:
249 West 17th Street
New York, NY, 10011
© 2012 About.com | | | | |
Must Reads | | | | Follow me on: | | | |
Advertisement
 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment