Color Design, general notes

Although there's no need, strictly speaking, to use the web-safe palette, I tend to start with a fairly restricted palette, arranged by hue and/or value, and then modify from there. The web-safe palette is actually not a bad starting place for that approach, and is a familiar industry de facto standard that many other applications design around. Lynda Weinman has a nice explanation of the web-safe color discussion, along with useful presentations of the palettes. Whatever palette you use, the important considerations are:

• constrain the number of colors used in the design
• associate each color with meaning, from the interaction design, to support sense-making.
  • let me pound this home - aesthetics matter, but functionality is primary
  • color is there to support interaction design and sense-making, not information architecture
• convey meaning redundantly, so that color-blind site users have equal ability to use the site
  • see also British Telecomm's extraordinary resource on Safe Web Colors for color-deficient vision
• use colors with high contrast
  • Visibone has wonderful color charts that help with this as well as color vision issues

main interaction themes, plus a few additional content elements, using colors only

• main text
• tools
• topics
• webs
• personalization

with redundant information, and shading variations:

• main text
• tools
• topics
• current topic
• visited topics
• webs
• personalization
• all links while hover