I'm baffled. I'm trying to find suitable colors for a logo that would look similar across most monitors/screens. I know it's near impossible, but how does one end up with the color palette that new Google logo and Facebook "blue" uses for example?
I've a monitor that has been calibrated, and a few laptop screens that have default settings. Yet both the Google logo and facebook's look similar (although they aren't using colors restricted to the web safe 216 palette.
Any ideas? thoughts?
Thanks
This is a impossible question, the reason Google & Facebook look the same is because they use colours that are either very strong (Google) or very dark (Facebook blue). There is no magic color that looks the same across all computers. This could be for various reasons like LED brightness or just calibration.
Example: My iMac has a very crisp and bright screen right out of the box but my 6 year old dell laptop doesn't show colours the same way no because their not calibrated but because they are just different computers.
My best advice is to use a very bright or a very dark colour like how Google and Facebook do and hope for something right in the middle. It won't be amazing everywhere but hopefully it will look OK everywhere.
You can't get colors to look the same on all screens...it is impossible.
The Browser safe color pallet is dead.
http://kottke.org/03/08/browsersafe-web-color-palette-declared-dead
Use a color pallete generator to see what colors look good together
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/
Contrast. As long as it maintains a similar contrast, then it will appear to be almost the same.
Related
I created a PeerComponent, that is a port in Codename One of the Horizon Camera SDKs. At the moment, it simply shows a live-preview of the camera.
I tried to add a Label over the PeerComponent: the Label is on top only in Android. On iOS, the Label is on bottom (that means invisible).
I've done a lot of trials to get a correct z-ording on iOS, without success.
My question is which tips, suggestions or checks can I do to make z-ordering working properly on iOS also. Thanks.
Normally it should "just work", there is no special treatment. I think horizon paints in an area we rely on and doesn't paint when we expect it to. Looking at their sample code I see that they reference top and bottom elements which might allow working around this.
I am using Light on dark color scheme in my WPF application.
My question is what are the negative aspects of this color scheme and why this color scheme is not widely used?
Please follow this thread at here
Darker color scheme are often used effectively in software that focuses heavily on visual content. For example Adobe Lightroom, Adobe After Effects, Microsoft Expression Blend, and Kaxaml are are interfaces that have a dark color theme. This allows the interface to fade into the background and let the content come alive
Why is it not widely used? I guess it depends on your crowd. For these application it tends to work out great but many people don't like dark interfaces. At my company I created an interface for a very complicated piece of software using a dark UI. It helped to simplify everything and bring attention to the necessary elements at specific times. The problem was, a lot of people complained. "It's too dark," "it doesn't look good on my laptop when I am using in the bright sun" etc. Some people just hate dark interfaces.
Bottom line: if your applciation is very content driven, esp with visual content, consider a dark interface but be prepared for some opposition.
Alternative solution: provide 2 themes, one light and one dark. This is done in Microsoft's Expression Blend (although the light theme looks quite awful, IMO)
Also, it is important to note it is often a bit more difficult to get a dark interface that works well. A little more care must be given to legibility of text on the dark background (i.e. making it bright enough to be legible but not so bright that it is distracting to read.
I have two major issues with dark color schemes:
Windows (and most other OS themes) are light by default, which makes most other applications light. It is nice when all applications have consistent graphical theme.
It is much less readable when there is a lot of light around (like sun shining on your screen), and today's glossy screens don't exactly help with this.
Most people (not all) find it harder to read light text on a dark background than dark text on a light background.
It was something that was pointed out to me in school when creating powerpoint presentations, and I noticed the difference when students ignored the recommendation and did a dark background anyways.
I am developing a medical application which is intended to be used in somewhat darker ambients, such as radiology laboratories, so we are using a dark UI similar to Expression Blend Dark, because we noted a light UI is too glaring in those ambients.
The application is supposed to display color images, and subtle intensity changes should be discriminated by medical staff.
A similar thing happens with Photoshop and LightRoom and any other application where color discrimination is important: the user should not be glared, either globally by overall UI brightness, either locally by high contrast in small text, for example.
One reason why we have better visual acuity with light bagckgrounds is that more light makes our pupils compensate it by contracting, thus sharpening focus. On the other hand, dark background makes us adapt to dark, and a crispy glaring light-colored text tend to "overflow" over the background with undesirable results.
There is no absolute counter-indication for using dark backgrounds, it's actually a matter of making the "light" parts have the right brightness so that they are well-seen without being glaring, and maybe having different regions of not-pitch-black, to "buffer" that glaring a little.
Hope this helps.
I'd like to show some client that Silverlight can be used as a technology for BL apps. They were shocked that some firm waste the money for so crappy looking technology (it's about MS)...
I just presented a screen with a few TextBoxes and some other controls...
Any size of the font in pixels or pts I use (or TextHintingMode), with embedding the font as a resource (or not) - the result is all the time very poor. It looks really crappy !!!
Is it possible that after four versions of Silverlight Microsoft doesn't know how to render some text looking readable?
Or maybe I just don't know how to prepare TextBox with sharp and clear Tahoma font.
Any ideas?
Magnified sample from client's TextBox is below:
Have a look the following article:
http://10rem.net/blog/2010/06/06/wpf-and-silverlight-choose-your-fonts-and-text-rendering-options-wisely
The font you're using may not be optimized for the size you're displaying it at.
I'am testing a WPF application, and I have noticed a strange issue.
I am using duel monitors one is using the 32bit High colour, the other is using 16bit Medium colour. This is so that I can match the resolutions nicely.
If I open the application on my high colour screen I have no problems, but if I open it on my medium colour screen I get a terrible graphics lag, as soon as I move the mouse over the application. It makes it impossible to use the app on this screen.
Is this likely to be a problem with WPF or the Application? and is there any way to fix it?
Thanks in advance.
This an issue with the graphics pipeline; it has been described by Raymond Chen.
In short, don't do that.
Avoid monitors with differing color depths at all costs.
Just had the same problem... A colleague found out, that the problem is the Windows-Transparency. If you deactivate that on the 16bit screen, it works.
Many of the WPF examples and samples that I see seem to have hard-coded colors. These guidelines - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa350483.aspx suggest not hard coding colors. After building a small application I was disappointed to see that some of my hard-coded color choices made some sections of the application unusable when I changed to a high contrast color scheme.
Assuming that you are working with a 'designed'/visually interesting/stylized UI - how is color accessibility provided? Should the designers provide alternative color schemes for special needs? Should color configuration screens be included in the application? Other solutions?
Any insights and suggestions appreciated.
EDIT: I accepted the answer below because I think the suggestion to have a predefined color scheme based only on system colors is a great idea/solution for my question.
I would be very interested to hear from someone who has implemented this scenario for accessibility if there are any technical details/pitfalls/gotchas that would be useful to know when setting this up.
Thanks!
'designed'/visually interesting/stylized UI as you put it often looks really bad if you just swap colors, it also tends to have a lot of colors - so I wouldn't add a color configuration feature to my software.
For accessibility you need either a high-contrast color scheme and the option to change color schemes (not individual colors) - and in that case the designer should provide those colors.
or - even better from an accessibility point of view (but not from a design point of view) - an option to drop all the "visually interesting" styles and drop back to plain windows default black on gray look - using only system colors, without any actual colors defined in the application.
The application will look very ugly in this mode - but customers with vision problems will love you for it.