How to ruin your website in 5 minutes
Thursday June 12, 2003 – 6:49 amColors, ugh. I’m trying to come up with a decent color scheme to use for the idea I mentioned in the last post. The idea is to get my posts to appear in differently-styled boxes, using colors based on their categories. I.e., a post in ‘Spam Tirades’ would logically be colored diarrhea-brown with little turds around the border, whereas something in ‘my photos’ might look better against a plain cream-colored box. Trouble is, I have a LOT of categories and don’t want to get too crazy with this.
I know a little bit about using RGB and hex codes to make web-safe colors. But I’m not a designer or a mathematician so I don’t really know why certain colors clash with or complement each other. And I’m too lazy to learn, so inevitably my choices turn out looking butt-ugly when placed next to each other. The first page I threw together to illustrate my idea just looked like some kinda ice-cream parlor. I was eyeballing it, choosing shades from a hex-coded color chart — I have to get more scientific and pick a swatch that actually goes together in the mathematical sense.
The tools I’ve found online don’t give me what I want, or maybe I just don’t know what to do with them. Like, here’s one that optimistically claims that "Choosing colors has never been easier"!! Riiiight, so why are there 500 little buttons and boxes and sliders then?







June 13th, 2003 at 3:24 am
Scroll down on the index page and look for the brown box. I did it just to see what it would look like here, I’m not sayin’ I’m keeping it. At the moment the only category-related style that I have defined is for Spam Tirades, and it’s only on the index page.
June 13th, 2003 at 5:43 am
http://www.colormatch.dk/
this site is pretty simple and useful – mix a color you like and it gives you 5 others that go with it along with their hex values.
June 13th, 2003 at 9:56 am
Thanks nat, that looks really cool. Doesn’t seem to work in Camino though — I’ll try in a minute with some other browser.
June 13th, 2003 at 11:03 pm
Here’s my favorite tool so far… http://www.easyrgb.com/harmonies.php