You're Doing it Wrong

Some of the new mee.nuvians have been messing with their blarg's HTML; fewer have been venturing from the default color scheme. For those who are thinking about changing colors, you're probably finding that a good scheme is harder to create than it should be.  Well, there are tools that can help you find one.

Changing your blarg's color scheme doesn't mean just picking a new color and slapping them in your CSS.  There are many different elements that need to be colored.  Links (visited or not), text, element backgrounds...  Depending on your tastes, you might need five or six different colors to make your blarg look how you want.

Picking multiple colors that are supposed to live in harmony on your webpage can be made easy through the use of a color.  A color wheel takes an initial input and gives you a number of complementary colors.  These can vary depending on the wheel and the color theory behind the choice you make.  A good color wheel will allow you to choose from many different styles of complementary colors by allowing you to choose from among them.

My favorite is Well Styled's Color Schemes 2.  You can pick a seed color from the wheel or enter in a hex value.  You can pick from five different complementary schemes with six different variations each.  It then gives you four complementary colors, each of which also have four different variations. 

With that much flexibility and an easy to use point-and-click interface, you can quickly find a good color scheme for your blarg .  Or at least that's the theory.  I'm still trying to find a good scheme for my blarg ...