References on Colour in Screen Design
‘Web Safe’ colours
The idea is that colours should be selected that remain constant over different hardware platforms, so that what the designer determined, the user sees. A bit of a holy grail and do we really mind if the users’ perception is not precisely what we ordained? I don’t. I believe that in the average application, close enough is plenty good enough.
Colourblindness
http://colorfilter.wickline.org
An opportunity to look at your site – or someone else’s – through a colourblindness filter. Very useful for testing one’s website indeed. You may be surprised, or not I hope, to find that the majority of web pages that are hard to read with a filter turned on, are also hard to read with it turned off. Nonetheless, this is a mighty clever and useful tool and as a fun aside can also give quite a pretty and colour-unified look to your website with some of the filters on.
http://www.ackadia.com/web-design/ colorblind/ colorblind-links.php
Links to a number of web resources on colourblindness.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb263953.aspx
More on the colour deficiency issue, this time from Microsoft. As Hess, the writer, demonstrates, examples that a colour-blind person finds hard to read aren’t that easy to resolve by a normal sighted person either.
Philosophy of Colour
If close enough is good enough, what is close enough? A philosophical question, and there are some interesting philopsophical references to colour theory on the web, in particular:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/
Maund for Stanford University. Excellent article, in a sense a 20th century update on Goethe’s Theory of Colour.
Guidelines and Cognitive Science
Automation of Colour Choice
Computer Aided Design on colour determination at the design stage. A good intellectual challenge. Not yet achieved so far as I know.
http://colorharmony.massey.ac.nz/
Has been around on the web a while and appears not to have been updated, so maybe isn’t getting very far.
http://mcs.open.ac.uk/ik7/home.html
‘Research project concerned with the computer aided design of colour with special emphasis on colours in combination’. Can’t say I understand what he’s getting at in his research, but sounds like it ought to be be useful.
Edwin Land and the Retinex Theory
Various artists and experimenters throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries demonstrated just how relative, as opposed to absolute, colour is. The work of Edwin Land in the 1950s and beyond gave the whole issue greater scientific substance. Retinex could be described as a mathematical formulation of these ideas and has been developed by others following Land’s initiative.
http://kybele.psych.cornell.edu/ ~edelman/Course/ lightness/node4.html
One of a number of basic courses in the subject.
http://www.rowland.harvard.edu/organization/land/theory.php Some detailed background to the work of Edwin Land from the Rowland Institute at Harvard University.
http://www.ghuth.com
Gerald Huth takes the work of Land into a somewhat different direction and looks at the morphology of vision. Do take a look at this site.
Colour Symbolism
There are lots of references on the web to ‘red means war and passion’ etc. Most have little scientific backup. Some, however, are a bit intriguing.
https://www.msu.edu/~millettf/gatsby.html
An analysis of F Scott Fitzgerald’s use of colour symbolism in The Great Gatsby. There are lots of references to this on the web, it seems to be a theory topic on some American university English courses.
http://www.colour-affects.co.uk/
Not just colour symbolism, more an attempt at the application of colour psychology to business.