What's black and white and green and blue and purple and....

I explain my evolution from design to programming because "I got tired of trying to pick the CEO's favorite color." but in truth, I find that often the choice of what color to use to be the wrong question. In most cases, the best color to use is none of the above.

One of the earmarks of bad design is an overuse of color. I've noticed that the less color a design uses the more mature it appears. Slap a copy of Time against an issue of Newsweek and you'll see what I mean. Historically, print has only had color and its standards evolved to reflect this, but since the internet was born on the CRT, using colors early often and for everything under the sun.

Part of the problem is that HTML has a legitimite use for colored text: links. Color is the default signal for hypertext (and the default color is blue, though only Craig's List and Yahoo seem to care). Worse yet a secondary color (Purple by default) is used to ermark visited links, though this is often overridden. And once you start down a bad road, colored headlines, subheads, and bullets seem to come naturally.

I don't really want to repeat the excellent work of disabusing people of the value of unornamented type that has been documented in Type and Design, but I do want to emphasize that the amount of licence you can take with ornamental colors is inversely proportionate the the complexity of the actual page. In other words, if you have a multi-region, tabbed interface with complex widgets, maps and nested panels, its best to render everything you can with neutral colors. Blue has become the "new grey" for modern interface design; shades of dull gray-blues is the most popular second color for interfaces, but I still find controlled use of pure and high-contrast neutrals superior to most blue -based interface.