Web Color Picking

Found this great tool for picking web colours. ColorMatch 5k is a nifty utility for choosing complimentary colours for your next web site design. All you do is dial-in your main colour and it will give you 5 complimentary matching hues. Extremely useful.

Zen and the art of web color

The Zen of CSS Design is a fantastic book for anyone dabbling in CSS. In case you didn't know it is the companion book to css Zen Garden which is a fantastic demonstration of the power of CSS. The book is equally powerful. Some of the designs submitted are taken apart and put back together again, so that mere mortals can get an idea of how they were made. Extremely enlightening.

The book contains some great stuff on color too. It lists some examples of psychological associations with common colours. Like - Orange for fun and happiness - great - I'll build my site in orange! Hang on a minute... in a second chart in the book. Orange is "In the United States, a tradition in packaging design is to use orange to signify inexpensive items. When designing with orange for business sites, it's important to bear in mind." I didn't know that because I am British, which reminds me of a little problem for us people that spell color with the u - colour.

British Web Colours

Ok - you have just decided to make your h3 tags yellow. You code it in your CSS and it doesn't work - just boring black. Could it be the "UK Web designers colour bug"? Check you didn't spell color - colour. Something I am often caught out on.

More Colour Help

"Color Harmony 2" by Bride M Whelan is a great little book on choosing colour combinations. It lists colour palettes for different purposes and emotions. Very useful - would be even cooler if it gave you the hex values, but hey it wasn't written specifically for web designers - very useful nevertheless.