Choosing Colour Combination Schemes

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Color Harmony Workbook

Home Page > Writing and Publishing > Book Cover Design

Colour is all around us and we only need to look to nature as a source of inspiration.

The visually appealing organic hues of nature are currently a very popular trend, especially the pure hues of tomato red, moss green, hibiscus and beaver fur.

Think of the brilliant colour hues of a sunset or sunrise, the colours of the rainbow, flowers, trees, the mountains and deserts. These colours all provide wonderful combinations ready to use for our own design schemes. 

Learn to take notes of the combinations you find naturally occurring in nature and note these colour schemes ready to use in your designs or incorporate into your web site whenever you update or create a new site.

Also look at the colours other people have used and ask what it is you find appealing about them or what you don't like about them and you will soon get a feel for colour and colour combinations.

There are two things to watch out for when displaying your book cover designs on a web screen.

Screen Resolution

Your design may not look the same at 1024 x 768 resolutions as it does at the 640 x 480 resolution you may have used when you were creating it.

Experiment with the screen resolutions on your computer to see what the differences could look like to your visitors.

Use the safe colour palette

Although the colour safe palette is no longer a major concern due to video card memory now greatly expanded and capable of displaying millions of colours I have included this section for historical interest purposes only although their may be some people still using very old computers.

What does the safe palette mean?

For display on the computer screen we generally use only 216 colours of the millions of hues that we have available for use. This is because different computers e.g. PC's and Mac computers tend to use different colour palettes and only 216 of the colours available are common to both. Not all browsers used are compatible leading to viewing variations between  Internet explorer, Netscape navigator, or many of the other ones that may be used to view your screen.

How did this affect colour display?

Graphics become speckled because they are dithered with nearby colours or colours outside the 216 colour palette may be replaced by violently different colours.

If you wanted your design colour schemes to be seen as intended in a fairly consistent way it was advisable to stay within 216 colour range of safe colours.

Side Note:  Any graphics created for the web such as logos or buttons used to be confined the 216 web safe colours for the reasons mentioned above.

Writing and Publishing