Building with Web Colors: Codes, Tools, and Design Tips

Color theory is a vast subject that mostly requires application to understand. But color selection is also relative to the medium, where a digital designer looks at colors differently than an illustrator or a painter.
In this post I’d like to talk about web colors and how color selection applies to web design. Most designers already know the basics so I want to delve a bit deeper into these fundamentals. I’ve also gathered a handful of free resources you can use to help select the best colors for each web project.

Designing Layouts with Color

When first learning design it helps to understand some basics of color theory to help pick colors with purpose. However your eye is just as valid and often senses when something looks wrong, even if you can’t explain why.
This is the reason many designers jump head-first into layout design and learn as they go. Most things need to be experienced to fully understand why they work. So if you have the drive and patience to keep practicing then I promise you’ll slowly digest color selection techniques.
When talking about web colors there’s a concept known as web-safe colors. These are more of a relic from the past when monitors were not even 16-bit displays.

 

So are web-safe colors still necessary? According to many designers and this SitePoint article, absolutely not. But it’s nice to know why web-safe colors existed and how they’ve affected web color selection.

Also just because you can use any number of colors doesn’t mean that you should. The best layouts rely on a core group of colors and reuse them appropriately.
Remember to trust your eye and your gut. If something feels like it looks wrong, it probably does look wrong. And the best way to learn why is to play around changing things until something looks right.

Read more here: http://www.vandelaydesign.com/web-colors