Re: Equation for determining color "closeness"

Thanks, Roberto.

>I noticed that the complementary colour (directly opposite to each other in
>the colour wheel) combination has the highest contrast.
>http://www.webwhirlers.com/colors/combining.asp

In my experience, red and green are considered complementary [1,2,3,4].  In 
the resource that you cite red and green don't appear to be 
complementary.  Another source names the complementary pairs as [6]: green 
and magenta, blue and amber, and blue-green and red.

If red and green are complementary, there is at least one exception to the 
complementary rule: don't use green and red together (unless it is ok to 
miss the information presented in an overlap of the two colors).

What about the other definitions of complementary colors? Is it ok to 
overlap red and blue-green? Reading Aries's pamphlet [5] it seems that red 
on blue-green is OK as long as you use dark red against light blue-green 
and don't use light red on dark blue-green.  Joe's book seems to support 
this when he says, "Don't set green on red or red on green....unless: The 
items have considerable difference in brightness....If the lightness 
contrast is _indisputably_ high, you've solved the problem." [7]

So, it seems to me that the "complements rule," while short and sweet, 
doesn't quite stand on its own.  Brightness needs to be part of the equation.

--wendy

[1] http://www.sanford-artedventures.com/study/g_complementary.html
[2] http://www.colormatters.com/colortheory.html
[3] http://painting.about.com/library/blcompcolors.htm
[4] http://www.artsconnected.org/toolkit/encyc_colorwheel.html
[5] http://www.lighthouse.org/color_contrast.htm
[6] http://www.gweep.net/~prefect/pubs/iqp/node69.html
[7] http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter09.html

-- 
wendy a chisholm
world wide web consortium
web accessibility initiative
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
/--

Received on Tuesday, 2 September 2003 20:47:44 UTC