By: Zeus Perez

I have a hard time with colors, but here are the basics to my color theory. Also, I do not have a Doctorates degree on the subject like an artist I know.

Scheming

Here's a simple color wheel I created for a client, knowing that these would be the colors to define them. If you want to use more colors, remember that when you attempt to use too many, your work may lose it's focus in the primary areas. The Complimentary colors I chose above were meant to bring brightness into the final piece. Scientific research has shown that color increases readership, but unfortunately color costs more money when working in print, and on the web, too many colors may disengage audience members.

Take this site for instance, it's full of colors, but the prospect of white in the center focuses the users attention. Each category has it's own color scheme that defines the area the user has visited. When I had spoken to a friend, he said to me to use the negative space, although this site doesn't use that perspective in full, I used the negative space to draw focus to the positive space, where you are currently reading.

When I select the primary color that will be used for a site, I usually also selects it's complimentary color for focus. If i use green, purple will be the stand out color. Then I select a text color that will balance the site a bit. Normally a deeper grey achieves this, sometimes for richer text, I'll use black. If I want bold, I use deep reds, which I know will catch attention.

I used to use black for backgrounds until I realized how much ink I was draining from printer, not to mention that all the negative space can have an impact on the final product. Use black if you want to emphasize one thing, otherwise, the product may seem smaller than what it is. White always makes things look bigger. Here, see this block of text in black and back to white. FYI I did that using javascript and document.getElementByID('block').style.backgroundColor='black'; or white and the TD within the table has an ID of "block".

About Text For Web

Always save text for web as a GIF if possible., saving it as a JPEG will inevitably (word of the day) cause pixelation unless you save it at high enough resolution. When saving pictures be aware of the colors you have chosen for backgrounds and the actual colors you get. The image to the left shows an image being saved as a GIF and another as a medium quality JPEG using Save To Web in Adobe Photoshop. You'll notice that the background colors have changed, not by much, but this happens often when saving images as JPEG's. The only way to check this is to select the background color using the color picker and raising the JPEG quality using the slider, rechoosing the colors with the color picker, until the background color is correct. This is very time consuming and requires a watchful eye, but once you know this happens you're online background matching will become seamless.