Livelygrey

What do you know...
Just after finishing my Google analysis, a new search engine launched: Cuil. So I decided to perform another color analysis.

Here's Cuil:While this is cool:Can you see the difference?

Here's what I did:
• The blue color was used inconsequential. Now everything blue indicates links or clickable objects. The only exception is the cuil logo
• I played with the contrasts to make some things more better visable. The i in Cuil was too dark and didn't stand out enough from the background. Same goes for the 'search' button. The search button is, after all, what Cuil is all about. So you better damn well make it an eye catcher. Same thing in the bottom bar. I toned down the '2 Columns' indication. It IS already 2 columns and I can see that. I'm only interested to find the option '3 columns' when I need it. So '3 colomns' should be better visable than' 2 columns' and should be blue as well to show it is clickable. Same thing goes for the page numbers.
• I have no idea what the green links at the bottom of each search result are all about. They are copies of the links at the top of the result. I don't understand why it should be green either. So I made it grey to tone it down. They could be dropped for all I care but hey, I'm just the color guy...

Just to have a little fun, I tried reconstructing the Google color scheme. Just to see if I could improve it in only half an hour with a bit of Photoshop magic. Here's what a Google results page looks like, these days:
If I throw our all the details and just concentrate on the blocks of color in the page, then this is what I see:
The current page isn't very well organized. The page kind of falls apart. There's an awfull lot going on where it comes to color. The colors tend to bounce your eyes from one location in the page to the other. The page definitely lacks color structure. The only reason Google gets away with the color design is because they are extremely carefull not to clutter the page with redundant information.
I'll concentrate on making the page header more visable, to seperate it more clearly from the search results. I'll turn the header into one block of color. This is what it could look like:
Now if I translate this back into the page design, this is what I come up with:
I'd say the page is much more structured now. I'm not saying this is a good design. This is merely a quicky to show what you can do with a bit of color structuring. It would need a lot more effort to make it real good.

Please note that I didn't change the color scheme at all. These are the same old colors. I only applied the colors in a different manner.