[legolas]

Hi all,

I'm trying to buil an online community and I need your help on the grafical part
I myselfe like soft collors in a website (white as main collor, soft blue as second by example) but when I look at other on-line communitys they always have black as main collor and rather hard second colors like bright green or rather dark red. Now I was wandering if those collors make visitors more active or somthing. I know that soft colors create a relaxed mood, but I want to give some kind of "feeling home" mood too.

Any advise from people with knowledge about this is verry welcome.

Thanks,

Johannes

[Gort]

Hehe...
Color use is totally up to you, but you're right in questioning good usage - especially for web design. Color balance is good and within the right conventions for design, but color choice can be determined by your target audience.

If you're a designer promoting your skills, a super-duper out of this world palette may be what you want - you're trying to appeal to other designers, art directors (aka the person(s) that might hire you).

Typically a site that is highly functional - especially those invloving ecommerce - will have a non-intrusive, muted palette. The reason is to place empahsis on functionality - not whizbang looks. It's often challenging trying to find a good balance between something that people say "wow" to and delvery of content / fucntionality. A BB site might adhere to the same; minimal graphics and color balance a norm - people are there to post and discuss, so simplifying the process through minimal design is the way to go. If you have some colors you really want to use, just balance them accordingly with one another, and if you're really concerned about the colors you can alway solicit feedback from your user group.

So scope out your audience and try to manage their expectations - not yours. Probably the biggest problem with some sites is that they're designed for the designer, CTOs or CEOs - not the customers or audience they're intended to serve.

On another perhaps relative note, I refuse to work with a web safe palette any longer. It sucks and can deter creativity. Besides most machins out there these days are running higher depths, so screw web safe.

My two cents...

[WO]

Good point Tom, 99% of users today are viewing pages at higher resolutions. This allows designers to use a larger color spectrum, keep in mind thought that trends usually change every 3 months.

It is a good idea to have a couple of color swatches ready for updating your site, and try to avoid anything too bright as viewing content on a monitor is not as easy on the eyes as paper is.