Re: Best color settings

At 4:23 PM -0800 2/17/2001, Rob Eager wrote:
>I'm wondering what colors most people find pleasing to the eye on a web
>page (especially for background on a page that is mostly text) and, in
>particular, which ones are best for those with a color blindness.  For
>example - if anyone does have a red / green (or other) color blindness out
>there - I'd be interested in knowing exactly what it is you see if the
>background is red and the text is white (for example for a highlighted
>portion of text).

In general, the lightness or brightness of the color is the most important
thing when designing for color-blind people. (When designing for people
with normal color vision it's not trivial, either. Reading, say, red text
on a green background where the red and green have roughly equal brightness
is not fun even if your color vision is completely normal.)

As a very rough rule of thumb, if the page has enough contrast when you
view it on a black-and-white monitor, it's less likely to give most
color-blind people trouble, assuming you haven't used problem colors to
color-code parts of the page. (For instance, you'll want to avoid doing
things like "Upcoming conferences appear on a pink background, and past
conferences appear on a light blue background.")

Some helpful URLs:

<http://www.firelily.com/opinions/color.html>
<http://www.colorfield.com/insight.html>
<http://innovate.bt.com/people/rigdence/colours/>

--
jeanne a. e. devoto ~ jaed(at)jaedworks.com
http://www.jaedworks.com

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