I have a confession to make: I love color. I marvel at combinations as my pulse quickens. I’m fascinated how different colors come in and out of vogue, and remember olive green kitchen appliances with a combination of sentimentality and horror. When nobody is watching, I sneak onto the Color Lovers website (I’d like to say for the articles, but mostly I just look at the pictures).

I’ve known a few people who are exceptional at picking colors, some of which I have the honour of working with, who consistently come up with great combinations.

I’m not one of them though.

If you’re like me, you should check out The Color Scheme Bible. It has some good but brief introductory material on color theory, the role of light, and the emotional effects of color. The majority of the book however is filled with pages of color combinations, where each page has one major color, two supporting colors, and two accent colors. Although its intent is to help you pick colors for home decorating, its also a wonderful exploration of palettes. I have great fun just flipping through it. Some pages are bold, some surprising, others subtle.

Then there’s the “color theorist in a box” approach like you find online at Behr paints or Color Blender. These work pretty good and I’ve used the Behr site myself for picking two supporting colors to go with a wall color I had chosen, with pleasing results that I’d not have come up with.

In Eclipse 3.3, we softened the tab colors by blending white to the system TITLE_BACKGROUND. It was reasonably successful but in some cases (platform color schemes) the results weren’t as readable as I’d have liked, and in others I just found I didn’t quite like the results aesthetically.

We could probably refine the rules to improve contrast, although even this is complex because the human eye doesn’t work uniformly across the spectrum (for example, blues and blacks are harder to distinguish, and therefore require more contrast, than others with the same RGB delta). But when I look at books like the Color Scheme Bible and consider the nuances of the combinations, I question whether computing colors is a reasonable approach in the first place. It’s certainly a pragmatic approach because it means that no matter what platform you’re on, no matter what desktop color scheme you have, the results will look passable. But we can’t be confident they’ll look great. And its clearly no substitute for the clever eye of one gifted with color sense.

What do you think? Is computing colors enough for Eclipse? Or should we go the web/CSS route and supply palettes of pre-chosen colors that work well together but that have no relation to your desktop color scheme?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 11:57 am and is filed under Visual Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.