I'm working on a web app that has a brand color palette with 6 bright, bold colors:
- very dark blue/black - baby blue - magenta/pink - yellow - orange - lime green. The app needs to have a young, vibrant feel to it and I've been thinking about how to best use these colors. One way is to use the colors to color-code types of action. Right now I have the magenta to indicate 'action'. Green can mean 'save' or 'confirm' and yellow or orange can be used for error messages. But I'm also drawn to the idea of using the colors to identify types of content within the app. So, for instance, user contributed opinions might be orange; neutral, informational stuff might be light blue; stuff pulled from other external sites might be yellow. That kind of thing. I'm wondering if people have any experience or advice about how to approach setting up design patterns using color. What are the good ways to manage the potential conflicts between 'function color coding' and 'content color coding'? Are there any good resources out there on this? Another conflicting need, of course, is the need to make the page look nice and balanced, and reflect the brand. Sticking to a strict functional color scheme can make this difficult I think, because, for instance, many pages may end up with very few of the colors and lack balance. My usual approach is to use a much more conservative palette for most of the screen real-estate (maybe light, de-saturated blues/greys) and use colors sparingly. Then it becomes a little easier. But the bright, bold nature of this brand means I'm being asked to have areas of solid, bright color on the page, which seems tricky to me. P.S. The IXDA beta website is definitely coming along - looks promising. One usability gotcha right now is that, although you can reply to discussion threads via the website, there doesn't appear to be any mechanism for starting a new thread. Or at least I couldn't find it... ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
