Choosing a color scheme

noreply@blogger.com (Øyvind Neuman) — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 22:57:00 +0000

Since this is supposed to be design process based on other people knowledge – I picked up an article I read a couple of months ago. I read design blogs even though I normally do not do any design, maybe all this reading might prove useful.

Color

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/colors-web-design-right-combination/

With the help of this comprehensive guide it was fairly easy to choose green for agurk. Not only because agurk is cucumber in Norwegian and a cucumber is green. Green is the color of harmony, nature, healing, life, food and health. These keywords couldn’t be better at describing just what I intend with this site.

I also picked grey - giving the sense of seriousness, conservatism and traditionalism. This seems to fit the theme for both sites.

Red/Gray would be nice to work with, but since I already picked green the red/green combination would make it a bit to much Christmas all year round.

The meaning of purple is royalty and death, not quite the feel I want for a professional related blog.

Orange is connected with cheap goods and Halloween in the USA?

Yellow means happiness, hope, joy, cowardice, hazards, weakness. I use a little personal experience and rule yellow out since it reminds me of fast food.

Blue seems to be the only right brain choice one could do. Blue it is, we just ignore it meaning sadness. The other meanings sounds good: Conservative, bridal tradition, corporate, “something blue”.

Contrast

Contrast is king – site should be usable even in gray scale.

Letting the visual design be so strong that it doesn’t need enhancement of color clues – then letting color further bring the focus to the next level.

Reading this article also made me include white in the color scheme – to have real contrast for text.

Color Scheme

I decided on green and blue in the scheme and using the tool suggested in “Contrast is king” article I had a shot at combining these colors in an analogic color scheme, using the color scheme designer. A choose an analogic color scheme since it was the only one possible to fit both blue and green in the same scheme.

http://colorschemedesigner.com/#3t51Tw0w0w0w0

Right brain design

noreply@blogger.com (Øyvind Neuman) — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 22:18:00 +0000

Technologically minded people trying to design websites almost always end up dull or unusable – if not both. Visually oriented people end up with visual sites with no content.

How may I avoid this for my own personal domains? The obvious choice in a professional setting would be to go with a premade template. This is also what I would recommend a client.

What would the result be if instead of using the left part of my brain I just focus on making all the correct decisions? Standing on the shoulders of people who actually know what they’re doing. Not copying whole pieces like in a template.

Visual goals

A website as a gate to countless word of information? Or a visual feast of colors? How to avoid being boring but still be able to catch the readers attention.

This project is based on two domains with somewhat different profiles.

ProjectGo.com

Contains a blog about .Net, HTML, JQuery and other technologies I use daily. I write this blog to remember and to keep track of my own work with this website and other projects.

This is the domain which will be used for services needed for production ready projects.

Agurk.com

This domain will be in Norwegian and contain information about everything no limits except normal decency.

The domain is used for projects which are not in production.

I want each domain to be connected in visual appearance, but each having a different color scheme.

Technical goals

I been a fan of the concept CSS Zen Garden for a long time. Beautiful designs based on the same carefully tagged html. So I hope I may achieve the same experience at my own site. Clean html styled with glorious well documented human readable CSS.

JavaScript should not break the site purity, but be used to enhance the user experience.

It is a bad habit deciding on technology before defining the problem, but since I mostly use Asp.net at work I want to base this project on anything but Microsoft technology.

I would like to use a cloud hosting platform for the project, to get my feet wet in the cloud hype. Not that I expect this project to become such a huge success that it will ever need scaling.

For now I just use a blue plain template for this site.

Project Go