Well probably not much as this not a chapter in the advanced programming book. But when developing small projects the budget for hiring skilled designers are most likely absent. It shouldn’t be that way, but welcome to the real world. So the design is the developer’s responsibility, and there have been a lot of focus on building user friendly dialogs and web forms. Being user friendly and looking good is not the same though.
One thing that developers are very good at doing wrong is selecting colors. Selecting good colors have been neglected, and developers tend to select between the original 16 VGA text colors. Thing get worse when the developer needs two or more colors in the design, finding colors that match and look good together is probably an art that our logical brain does not understand.
But help is available…
In Microsoft Office 2007 they have done something about this, they introduced a color theme selection, where they have provided a long list of 8 matching colors. This is a great source for finding a number of matching colors, but you have little control over the selection, like I have this greenish item and need a reddish color for error messages.
Often you have one given color (ex. from a logo) and need to find matching colors for this. I found and used an online service provided by Adobe lab, which is called kuler.
In this you select the base color, and select the way you want the system to find matching colors, like Analogous, Monochromatic, Triad, etc. and the colors are presented with HCV, RGB, CMYK, LAB, and HEX values. Simply print the page and use it in your design – perfect. It’s also very easy to play with the color selection and see what effect even small changes can do.
Another part of Kuler is that you can browse colors created by others, most likely not programmers. There is a rating system so you can sort by rating or popularity.
Kuler can be found here http://kuler.adobe.com
Got interested in knowing more about colors, well read this simple introduction, it will only take half an hour of your time and colors will never be the same again.
Color Worqx at http://www.worqx.com/color/index.htm