
What is good color? (2015) - lelf
https://pavelkosenko.wordpress.com/2015/08/13/what-is-good-color/
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_yawn
Like all "theories" of art and music this model is no good as it isn't
predictive. There are plenty of good art with brightly saturated color.
Deciding spontaneously that muted colors are the one true way and then that
preference for saturation is some sort of retardation in development is just
laughable at best. I have a friend who prefers muted colors precisely because
he's color blind.

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headsoup
His point seems to be 'don't go near the scary end of colour and you're all
good: stick to pastels and use a million shades of nearly the same colour.

I don't think it explains good colour use, vision differences (e.g.
Tetrachromacy) or _why_ artists can sometimes seem to make horrible colours
work really well.

Better gradients does not necessarily equal better colour.

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hnzix
I find it fascinating that many Asian cultures do not distinguish between Blue
and Green, including their traffic signals [0]. And color symbology varies
between cultures [1].

There are also interesting parallels between the color wheel and the musical
circle of fifths. Or as Boards of Canada would have it, Music Is Math [2].

[0] [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-
ja...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-japanese-
traffic-light-blues-stop-on-red-go-on-what/)

[1] [https://jenndavid.com/colors-that-influence-food-sales-
infog...](https://jenndavid.com/colors-that-influence-food-sales-infographic/)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7bKe_Zgk4o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7bKe_Zgk4o)

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KineticLensman
The artist in me agrees with a lot of what he says but I do feel it necessary
to point out that in many applications there are other considerations than
colour harmony. Specifically accessibility for the large proportions of the
population who have some form of colour blindness and the need to develop
clearly distinguished palettes for information presentation (as opposed to
art). My go-to resource for non-artistic palette development is [0]

[0] [https://blog.graphiq.com/finding-the-right-color-palettes-
fo...](https://blog.graphiq.com/finding-the-right-color-palettes-for-data-
visualizations-fcd4e707a283)

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Kagerjay
This is a good resource, I have seen this authors articles before on forums
before too

Personally, what I have been doing with color choice selection is just use HSL
format. It makes it very easy to reason about and A/B test different colors to
see what pallettes work. I have not really considered color blindness though,
but per the article having color hues work in greyscale makes sense. Its like
printing black/white documents VS color based docs.

General rule of thumb to me is don't use more than 3 primary colors.

The first starting point is to work with the existing theme's logo color
choices. This vastly limits what range of colors you can use, depending on
what emotions you want to evoke.

Finding good color palletes is _hard_. Even with all the color choice palletes
out there. Somedays I spend literally an entire day tweaking color choices on
some projects. The critic in me cannot stand poor color choice selections.

I sometimes wish I wasn't terrible at art either, telling stories is so much
easier when you can make nice hand-drawn / watercolor drawings.

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JepZ
A great tool for choosing harmonic colors:

[https://color.adobe.com](https://color.adobe.com)

There are others out there, but that URL stuck to my mind.

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mutatio
Similar for paint harmonies and comparison:
[https://encycolorpedia.com/paints?color=dac8ac&brand=Pantone...](https://encycolorpedia.com/paints?color=dac8ac&brand=Pantone+/+PMS)

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rabidrat
As someone who does not have a great eye for color but would like to become
better, I really liked this model of color and how to create harmonious color
pallette. The color wheel never made sense to me.

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renjimen
Me too. It did a good job of putting in to words that which I had a gut
feeling for.

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Jack000
there's no universal standard for good color because it depends on context and
fashion.

eg. MS used blue as a calming color for error screens, but it became a symbol
for failure and frustration via the bsod.

It's also common knowledge to use warm colors for food, but this creates a
vacuum of blue colored food brands which now stands out (eg. blue apron)

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stesch
I only know that green isn't a creative color.

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jacobush
Teal and magenta is creative. You can't make nonconformist movies unless they
are color graded teal and magenta. And drink your coffee!

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ItsMe000001
The first thing I did was to change the text color from #666 to #000. It is
soooo much easier to read now. I don't understand why gray - and a pretty
light shade even (666 is pretty far from 000) - has become the standard text
color on (way too many) websites. None of my displays, from middlish quality
laptop to Adobe color space 32 inch monitor, show that as even close to being
the most readable text color. In addition, the page sets a font weight of 300,
combined with the font used it ends up with a pretty thin font that looks
grayish to begin with.

By the way, what is this character that's all over the text for me?

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KineticLensman
> By the way, what is this character that's all over the text for me?

It's a Line Separator character: U+2028 or HTML entity code &#8232

Not all browsers display it correctly. Based on a quick test, Firefox and Edge
do, Opera and Chrome don't. This is why it's worth checking your web content
in a variety of browsers as your content creation / publication tools aren't
guaranteed to produce browser-independent output.

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scarygliders
Don't want to sound ungrateful, but, if you're going to write an interesting
article on good colour, the least you can do is make sure the text of the
article isn't in light grey against a bright white background.

Just sayin' :)

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anonytrary
#666 is closer to dark grey than it is to light grey.

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scarygliders
Indeed.

And #000 is closer to black than to grey, and makes for a better contrast to
#ffffff, and hence easier to read for those of us mere mortals with eyesight
problems.

(p.s. apparently my original comment got downvoted - my apologies if my
comment was somehow offensive in some manner to someone - I honestly thought I
was making a good observation. Or perhaps it was a web designer who loves
making reading web pages as difficult as possible by camouflaging text as much
as they can get away with against a #ffffff background ;) )

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rocqua
Downvotes make text grayer, perhaps it was a communal attempt at humor?

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scarygliders
That hadn't entered my head as a possibility - since I'm feeling mean, have an
upvote to ensure your excellent comment stays black :)

