Livelygrey

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.

I bought myself a new car today. I couldn't resist when I set my eyes on it. The model is kind of vintage Mercedes, beautifully curved with a shiny radiator grille and golden bumpers. It even has hand crafted rims. Tell me, who could posibly resist a car like that?

Obviously, I was most impressed with its colors and delicate textures. The car has been crafted out of empty tin cans. If you look inside the car (it even has tiny chairs and a steering wheel) you can still see the brownish paint that used to be contained in the can.

Seeing the car, I see a kid somewhere in Africa or Asia putting it together out of a pile of junk. But most importantly, I see the kid passionately fussing over which piece of tin to choose for the roof, for the doors and the engine hood. That kid has realy put some effort into it. There's no piece to be found that hasn't been carefully hand picked and modelled for a designated place in the car.

As a result the car had some qualities that are lacking in industrial products: it has soul. Just look at that red roof and the red hood. The hood even has a yellow striping exactly where it meets the windshield.
Who wouldn't fall in love with such a piece of art?

Click here for a highres image.

Wired.com came up with a red photo contest the other day. Readers could submit their best red picture and vote on others.

See: wired.com

The top 10 pictures are quite nice. When browsing through the entries it struck me how many faces the color red actually has. Red is often associated with agression and arousement. But some of these pictures are tranquil rather than dynamic. These pictures illustrate nicely that colors are not easily caught into cliches.

The other day my 8 year old son received a comic book. It's one of a series called 'Suske en Wiske' (aka 'Spike and Suzy' or 'Willy and Wanda'). It's quite famous in the Netherlands. I actually grew up with these comic books. I still own a pile of them.
When I saw it, I was struck how the colors have changed since I was a kid. The style has remained practically unaltered, but boy have the colors come a long way...
I took out an old copy from my closet and compared it to the recent one. There's a 30 year gap between the two. Here they are, the old one on top.
The new colors are much more elaborate, much better structured. And they introduced the effects of lighting into the pictures. These days they use a lot more grey. But paradoxally this leads to clearer, brighter colors. In the old days many colors were competing to catch the eye of the reader. But no more. That makes makes for a much more tranquil overall image with just a few spots of color attracting attention.
And look at how the figures nowadays become much darker in dimmed light and dark spaces. It makes the spatial arrangement much easier to grasp.
All in all the design team did a great job. I'm impressed. So huge a difference while still preserving the style of the comic is quite a feat.

I came across the Birkbeck College project of Surface Architects.

BTW: their website is most certainly worth a visit. It has a most remarkable use of color. It looks like they've extended their design principles to the website...

As it happens, I just came across several websites advising people to limit the number of colors in a design. What's wrong with this advice?

Proper use of color has nothing to do with the number of colors that have been applied. You only need to have a look at the work of Vincent van Gogh to be convinced. And obviously there are numerous other artists who have falsified this idea as well.

What is important is to structure your use of color. In other words: you need to have a clear idea of where your design is headed and how to get it there. Just for fun I looked up some well designed websites that use a large number of colors:
Colourful pictures incorporated into colourful texts and menus
A wild, yet very powerful use of colors
Funny but 'to the point' use of colors
On this Mercedes website color IS the structuring ingredient
And another website where color brings structure

Yet it hurts me more than I can tell you to look at this map. I happen to have relatives living in Baghdad....

By popular demand, I've published a list of the most instructive books about color in my bookcase. You can find it on the right side of the homepage under the header 'Books'.
Enjoy!

Oh my...
There we go again. I came across this page at dwell.com where Fred A. Bernstein says:

I’ve always been vaguely embarrassed by color, associating pastels with kitsch and primaries with kindergarten. I’m not even sure I agree with Meier, who claimed, in his Pritzker Prize acceptance speech, that he likes white “because within it you can see all the colors of the rainbow.” I like white because within it I can’t see all the colors of the rainbow.

Here’s a question for you, Fred: Why does Richard Meier publish only color images of his work?
To choose a white or grey surface for a building is as much a color choice as any other. Look at the work of Le Corbusier. He used brightly painted surfaces alongside bare concrete. I somehow don’t think that was because he ran out of paint...