November 23, 2006
Making Theme Changes…
People for a long time have complained a bit about my color scheme, that there may not be enough contrast between certain colors. Being colorblind, I never had a problem, but I was starting to get sick of the weird-looking graphic on the side, and decided to make some changes.
But, as I mentioned, I have no eye for style, and so any assistance, suggestions on colors, etc, would be highly appreciated. I’m a boring guy, so I was going to do everything in shades of gray, but that didn’t look good… So I’m looking for some suggestions. Thanks!
Also, if anyone has any idea why my “Categories” and “Archives” text is so tiny, let me know. I’m using Wordpress php functions to pull that up, so that might be part of it. But I’m not sure how to make it better.
14 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
The grey backgrounds arent bad, but one should never use any blue text lighter than navy, unless it’s either greenish, or extremely light blue against a very dark background (like black), because the link convention uses blue as an indicator color.
Also, blue on grey causes eyestrain for a large segment of the population; as does blue on white.
Thanks, Chris… What do you think now? Any further suggestions?
this is good and easy to read good choice
The red is a bit too bright a contrast with the white; I’d recommend taking white to a slightly off white, or very light grey, and changing the red to a very dark red.
This prevents color clash and bleed on high contrast or very bright screens, and on LCDs.
Other than that, I’m digging the general concept. I am a bit surprised you didnt go for black and gold…
Ask your wife?
Chris,
I’m horrible with colors… If you have any suggested HTML color codes to try, I’d appreciate it. I may also look into the Old Gold & Black idea, I hadn’t thought of that!
VRB,
Yes, and she likes it… I may enlist her help a bit to clean it up even more.
I would start trying the background with 660000 and go up to AA0000 on the background, and EEEEEE on the inset.
Better? I like way the EEEEEE background looks, but I’m too colorblind to know if the red is still too bright.
It’s not too bright now, but I think it would look better with a darker red.
The EEEEEE does look good though.
One thing on the grey; against some backdrops and on some screen types, very light grey can develop a blusih cast.
For example, I have five monitors, and it shows up as slightly bluish on two of them.
The bluish isn’t bad, and against a darker red would be even less noticable, you you may want to try EEEEDD to tone down the blue if it is noticable on your screens.
Ok, I jsut did some experiments; see how this looks to you:
660000 for the frame color
FFFFed for the inset color
Ah, the wonders of the cache…I get the email after being cut off from the internets for a couple of days so I head on over here to take a look and…it looks exactly the same. Huh.
*Refresh*
THERE we go.
Anyway, I think it looks fine, but I didn’t really have a problem with the old one, so that should tell you my ability with matching colors. You can take the engineer out of engineering, but you can’t take the engineering out of the engineer. :-p
More important than the color scheme, is the size of the font for me and other nearsighted persons. This is about right.
It loads much faster. I really dislike blogs that load slow. Of course, you were borrowing from a template that I built to load fast, so …..