Web colors
April 11, 2007
At our local web meetup group tonight, the topic was colors. The group was great, and there were a lot of good design tips on colors and color selection. One good tip was when choosing colors for design, try the colors on a black background, then one a white background. You’ll get different ideas about how those colors work together in different scenarios, and may make you think twice about those combinations (or may reinforce that they work work well together!). There were a number of great tools listed, including
http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/Technicolor/
http://www.triplecode.com/munsell
http://design.geckotribe.com/colorwheel/
Mitch, the organizer, put together probably another 20 links. I’ll try to add a few more of those in the next week or so as I visit/use them.
We also talked about ‘web safe’ colors (not really an issue these days), monitor gamma issues, color correction issues, and just a bunch of other useful stuff. I had my podcast equipment with me - we should have recorded the whole thing! 
A general rule that came out about color for the web was to try to view your work on as many different systems to determine how your colors may be viewed different on various systems. If there’s a big variance in how some of your colors could be altered, you’ll likely find it by looking at multiple systems instead of just your one system. I’ve found this to be true even just working on projects at home - my laptop colors display radically different than the emac and imac monitors (which have differences themselves too).
I also learned that CMYK< ->RGB is not a one to one mapping. Apparently, RGB can represent a wider colorspace than CMYK. The whole color/printing aspect of things was/is a whole new world, and it was a humbling experience to be around so many knowledgeable people expert in things I know so little about!
Another very interesting site was http://www.mariaclaudiacortes.com/
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