Welcome to Gaia! ::

Actually, It's red and green, blue and ORANGE, yellow and PURPLE.

The scientific explanation of this is simple. The human eye perceives different colors to be at different distances. Which means that your eyes focus a little closer or father depending on the color. When you have red against green, your eyes will shift very quickly between two focus depths (which are very close, but still different). THAT's why complimentary colors cause eyestrain.

Now, how about a word on color choices...



This is a generic color-wheel. The primary colors are, of course, Red, Yellow and Blue. Secondary colors are Green, Violet and Orange. And then you have the tertiary colors which exist between primaries and secondaries, such as Red-Orange and Yellow-Orange. These are always listed primary first. If you really wanted to, you could break it down again to red-red-orange and orange-red-orange, but we won't bother with that for this discussion.

There are five primary types of color schemes. These are:

Monochromatic - everything is the same color in different shades.

Analogous - All colors are taken from closesly related colors. This is represented by the blue arcing line in the diagram.

Complimentary - The scheme consists of two colors (usually more than one shade of each). This is represented by the green line.

Split Complimentary - The scheme consists of three colors, where the second and third are to either side of the compliment of the first. This is represented by the purple 'Y' line.

Primary / Secondary - A color scheme which uses the primary or secondary colors (red yellow blue OR green orange violet respectively) Or two of the three.



These were knocked together in Photoshop for example. I used the HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) sliders to pick colors. In the first (Monochromatic), the HUE is not changed at all - only saturation and brightness.

In the second (Analogous), the HUE is changed a couple of times to make a scheme with blues and blue-greens. There are variants on each of the two HUEs by changing saturation and brightness.

The third, complimentary, also has two HUEs. Yellow and 'violet'. These are DIRECT compliments, but you can also use near complements (Yellow and Red-Violet or Yellow and Blue-Violet... or even go as far as Yellow and Blue, which would be a Primary type color scheme.) Again, more than one saturation and brightness for each color.

The last example shows a Split Complimentary, using Green against Red-Orange and Red-Violet (the burgundy menu area and text). It is my own, personal opinion that split comps are nearly impossible to pull off well - they almost always look chaotic. But if you CAN make a good split comp, it will be very, very vibrant.

Also, remember that variations in saturation and brightness can be very powerful. Just look at the Monochromatic example. You can get a LOT of color variation without even changing the actual COLOR (just using different shades.)

And there you have it.

-V

www.nvu.com

Excellent text editor.

I think that before making a web-page, you need to know what your content is, and who you're presenting it to. This way, you can design the page in such a way that will be pleasant to them. If your web-site is going to be visited by older people, use a bigger font. If epileptics are visitng, for god's sake don't use a flashing background.

While I'm on the subject of content, I'll say that you need to be certain that people care about whatever you're putting on the page. If I created a website about my dog's poop, it doesn't matter if God was my web-designer, becuase no one cares about my dog's poop.

Although an extreme example, many many many people create websites about their pets or about themselves or about their aunt Tina's left big toe, when quite frankly, no one cares. Yes, your puppy is cute, you seem nice, and you aunt has clean toes. So what?

I think that people should ask themselves "Does anyone actually care about my content?" before even starting a web-page.

to add to your post, the user might want to make a file-tree style layout and storyboard for their site, so it is organized before uploaded. =D