I love the technique David Shea discusses in his “Photographic Palettes.” In particular, the box-drawing: drawing a box in the color you want to use and adding on top smaller white and black boxes of varying opacities to generate a color palette. I have come across the concept of choosing color from a photograph, and though I haven’t done it yet, now that I’ve seen a rather cool demonstration of it, I will have to try it soon. I’ve come across a few things recently that also help with color strategy —namely Eric Meyer’s Color Blender, which is great for finding shades of a color or colors to create a coherent color theme for your website. I am also reading The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag and in Chapter 2, “Design,” in the section called “Springtime,” the authors discuss “Using Color to Evoke Emotion” and mention a few other useful tips. My favorite, which is similar to the one Dave Shea mentions in his “24 Ways” article, is creating a color strip in Photoshop. Much like a paint swatch card, you can create boxes of color and shades of color to see how they complement one another. The advantage of this method is that once you find a pleasing palette, you can not only save it as something that you can easily refer back to, you can also easily select the RGB/Hex value in the swatch and paste it into your CSS. [Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag, The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web, Berkeley: Peachpit Press, 2005, p.64.]

Danilo Black USA website—an example of minimal color in website design. At Chuck Green’s Ideabook article on Color Strategy, he discusses four strategies for color selection in web design:

1. Using subdued colors to highlight the main focus of a website: the product or service, as at the New York Times, Apple, and Barnes & Noble.
2. Color-coding sections of a website to create continuity and clarity of your message throughout your site.
3. Minimize number of colors: while I really, really like the website in his first example in this section (Danilo Black USA), the site, and maybe it’s out of date, seems to have no content. There are only a couple of links and I can’t figure out what the point of the site is. Visually, though, it is very appealing.
4. Deconstruct exemplars: find sites you like and pull out the colors they use and figure out how they use them, then apply this to your own site.

Now, after being obsessed with design and seeing design elements and font styles everywhere, I’m sure I’ll notice color and color schemes…

After looking around at a few of the class’s blogs, I commented on Lee Ann’s blog about, basically, the learning curve and expectations with regard to this design stuff. I am continuing a thread I started when I posted about “The Polyglot Manifesto,” saying that we can’t all be great at everything. Now, I don’t want to sound negative or like I have no personal ambition, but I do believe it is rare to find people who excel at -everything- they do. I guess I’m trying to be encouraging to myself and others in saying that it’s okay to get just the basics and to plod away at this doing the best you can. Sure, you push yourself and challenge yourself, but I don’t think you should punish yourself if you aren’t as competent as Dave Shea after six months of practicing CSS web design.

I also added on James’s blog that web design is indeed hard work and time-consuming. It seems similar to writing and editing a paper, you can edit and re-edit and edit some more and refine and refine until you get your final product just the way you want it. That’s why I like my job: I get to constantly challenge myself to create something new or to achieve something specific with my design. Plus, there’s always some new CSS technique…

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