I really enjoy most aspects of the front end design but not so much something as basic as choosing colours! I think I end up using very similar schemes for a lot of my pages because I just don’t know what else to do!
Anyone have any good resources for choosing or finding inspiration? I’ve found http://www.hexcolortool.com/#ff6166 which will show you complementary colours for the one you’ve chosen, but I’m not sure I’ve actually found it’s choices look that great together on a page.
Some great resources here, thank you all!
Okay, you probably know this already but about 8% - 10% of the population has a color vision deficiency (CVD or color blindness). In most cases, that means these colors look nearly alike, so avoid contrasting these against each other:
red-green-orange-brown (all of these look sort of brown)
purple-blue (looks blue)
pink-gray (looks gray)
red-black (looks black)
Also, after age 40 all people in the world lose the ability to focus well on near objects (hence, reading glasses). This gets worse over time. So try to make text at least the equivalent of Verdana 9 pt (imho, even larger). And in terms of color, use black text instead of gray or use a high-contrast text color.
I’d also recommend looking at successful sites that have a similar audience so you can maybe use a similar color scheme. For sites that have products/services that are similar to the one you’re designing for, you might want to do something very different to distinguish your product.
I like using Palettable.io…it randomly picks a color, and you can press ‘D’ to dislike or ‘L’ to like the color. It will randomly choose five colors in total and help you put together a palette. It’s a fun tool and I find it really helpful for picking colors when I go to start a project.
This is the best response in the thread.