Choosing colors for my new Wordpress theme (tenatively titled Webster) is proving problematic.
I know, there are a lot of color-scheme aids out there, but when it comes right down to it, they don’t help that much. You still need to decide where to put those colors. What color will the links be? The background? Other elements, if any? The text on the pages… the post-titles, the meta data? Just because you’ve been handed a collection of colors that (supposedly) complement each other doesn’t mean that you can assemble them on a page so that it looks good.
I’m beginning to realize that one of the reasons I’ve gravitated toward black & white in my themes is because it’s just easier. It’s also been used to good effect by many others, but unless that message of stark simplicity is actually part of what you’re trying to communicate (which, sometimes, may be just what you want), it’s just sort of an easy way to avoid picking any colors.
Now is the point in the post where I drop the sublime wisdom that will make picking a color scheme easier, simpler and more lovely. Sorry. Like I said before, even knowing which colors are complementary, which will accent the others perfectly, still doesn’t mean you can lay them out nicely on a page. It will probably take you a lot of time, experimentation, and rewriting of the CSS — in other words, a lot of work.
In a time when the majority of website builders use a pre-designed theme, I think we sometimes forget how hard it is to design.
