Color for Developers, part 3

Charles Field, Monday, June 11, 2007 @ 3:24 pm

Through a glass badly

"This is not a pipe."  R. Magritte

You are reading this on screen. It is not what I expected.

One of the biggest problems for any on-screen designer is the weird backlit medium we fish swim in. This is true if you are creating interfaces for browsers or desktop applications.

By now you are asking why, why does he continue to torture us with these vague allusions and puzzling suppositions. Well it is just my sick idea of fun, really, but here is a simple test. Make a pdf of your favorite picture of a human. Put it on a flash drive and walk around to a few of your colleagues computers and compare the different displays. Extra points can be scored in two ways:

1] try a PC and any other platform, Mac, SGI, Treo

2] try laptop, lcd and CRT screens. If you can still find a CRT screen, they are fading into the dust of time or the junkyards of third world countries as we speak.

Of course you will find that the image of Britney Spears moments after the haircut discloses an array of skull colors limited only by the number of screens it is displayed on.

Individual hairs may or may not resolve, and the level of contrast will have a happy variety as well. This is where you work. Every one of your users sees this differently.

So great, isn't that a big mess, can we please just ignore it? Well no, that isn't really playing well with others. What we need is a basic strategy for accommodating this tragic reality.

There are commercial solutions to calibration available, or most Adobe programs ship with basic calibration tools. These will help... but only you. There is no way of knowing if your users ever did this, and we know that asking is not a scalable strategy.

Unless you are in a highly controlled situation, in an industry where there is a financial benefit directly tied to color fidelity, you can bet that no one really cares.

So what is the solution?

1] Design it a bit crude. Don't expect someone's screen to display a reliable difference between zero, 10 and 20 percent black, that is too subtle. Try 0, 15 and 30

2] Test it. Test it some more. Don't beat it to death, but it can definitely be too subtle.

There we go. In a few short blogs the secrets of your universe revealed. You have grasped the remote from my hand, grasshopper, do not watch Jerry Springer with the powerful tools you have been given.

Related posts:

1. Color for Developers, part 2
2. Color For Developers, V1
3. Design Doesn’t Just Mean Color
4. Rapid PowerPoint Prototypes for Ajax and Rich Interactions
5. Visualizing Rich Interactions in Paper Prototypes

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