REM State

Site Colors

Color is an important aspect of any site. It can affect mood, draw attention, and affect users in a multitude of other ways. So, naturally, I ignored all of that and just picked some at random ;). Seriously, there is some rhyme and reason to the color selection on this site, but not an awful lot. I may come back and re-select my palette later, but until I do, I’ll let you in on how I managed to come up with the current scheme.

Body Text

I started out with the notion that this would be a light-on-dark style site, which is my personal reading preference, and worked from there. I rejected my immediate thought of green-on-black (again, my personal preference) on the notion that it would probably be too garish for most anyone else reading the site. Furthermore, I didn’t want to go with white on black, due to the fact that white tends to be a bit too bold, and can (at least for me) slur a bit and make things hard to read. Thus, I settled for gray on black—this combination provides enough contrast to be readily readable, without blasting the user’s eyes out with superfluous light.

Links & Accents

The link and accent colors were driven off the gradient that serves as the background behind the section links at the top of the page. All of the accent colors are different values (intensities) of the same hue. Likewise, the link color is a specific value of this hue. Note that I specifically chose the link color such that it has enough of a contrast difference with the gradient to be clearly readable, but not so much of a contrast with the main text color as to be jarring. Also, the border colors were chosen to be mute enough to not be distracting, but bright enough to be clearly distinguishable from the black background.

So, how did I come up with the initial gradient? Well, to be honest, I just picked the color at random. In retrospect, the color is rather reminiscent of the old amber monochrome screens—it could be that, since I couldn’t have my green-on-black first choice, I subconsciously went for the next best thing. However, even if my low-tech fetish is manifesting itself, it wasn’t a conscious decision at the time.

Flukes

There are two color-coordination flukes: the eye logo and the brushed metal background. The former happens to be a duo-tone image that uses a color very similar to the accent color, while the latter is a gray that matches nicely with the color that my browser has chosen for the gray text. These were totally, totally accidental—if you ever create a site to practice doing graphic design, be more careful than I in considering the color of everything!