Help w/ team website colors, plz!

[RbtGal1351]

Hey, we're a 2nd year team, and we cant decide what colors we should use for our website and everything. (aka too many disputes...)

Our school colors are black and gold, but we're still not sure what to do, so i decided to post here. feel free to take our poll: http://amhsrobotics.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=38
(also plz say that ur a non-1351 member when you vote)

Thanks!
~Stephanie
ps- support me and say black and gold :-P ... jk mai team'll kill me if i say that... vote w/e you want, itz ok! LoL

[sanddrag]

This may help http://www.pubarso.com/color/ (Special thanks to Brandon Martus for this cool utility)

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

This may help http://www.pubarso.com/color/ (Special thanks to Brandon Martus for this cool utility)

The original colormatch does not work in firefox, it does work in IE.

Here's a good site for getting the hex for colors if you know what kind you're looking for.

[Elgin Clock]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

This may help http://www.pubarso.com/color/ (Special thanks to Brandon Martus for this cool utility)

Looks like Brandon moved it..
http://www.pubarso.com/color/colormatch.html

[JohnBoucher]

I also agree that it is a team decision. Keep it in house. They are the people that you need to please.

A neat tool that you can use to prototype website changes with from any computer without actually changing your code is the Firefox browser with the web developer tool bar installed.

Any page markup, (fonts, colors, H tags, table layouts, background, etc) that you have declared in your external CSS file can be temporally modified on the fly from any computer with Firefox and the web developer tool-bar. Open up your website or even any website and click on the CSS tab and then click on edit CSS. Your CSS file opens up and you can play with any of the settings and immediately see the changes. The more that you have in the external CSS file, the more you can play with.

It is a good tool for understanding CSS. It also makes a good argument for using an externally linked CSS file.

With 30% market penetration for Firefox, you need to be proofing your site in Firefox.

[KarenH]

One thing to remember is not only how the page looks, but how it prints. With most printers and drivers, the background color won't print. If your web page has gold text and graphics on a black background, what will print out is a page of gold text on a white background (the paper), which might not be easy to read.

You could get around this by having a link to a "printable" page having dark colored text on a light background. More work for your web designers!

On the other hand, black text and graphics on a gold background usually makes for easier viewing, especially if you have a lot of text or detail. Or you could put black and gold text and graphics on a light colored page.

All this is assuming that your team chooses these colors. But the printing issue can be a problem with any light-colored text.

[Alex Golec]

First off, the link has given me some login thing, so I'll just put in my vote here:

Make it a team decision. If you are having trouble deciding on a single set of colors, try to make a compromise within the group. Pick out a bas color (usually black, grey, or white) and add an additional one or two colors to set up a theme. If you want black and gold, and someone else would like a different set of colors, you should try to make some compromises and maybe add an extra color to the b&g scheme.

Honestly, I do not believe it should be up to the people of CD to make your team's decision for you. So, I will simply give you my short advice: do not break apart the people on your team with small disputes- compromise a bit.

_Alex

Just as a note: I like the idea of black and gold, just keep a color balence. In my opinion I dislike color schemes in uber-dark (ie black w/ blue text) sites and uber-bright (white + every pastel imaginable) sites because of the eye strain.