Colour Schemes and Typefaces

Starting to look at the layout of my site and what I am going to put in it. I have done some more paper prototyping of the various layouts that I have in mind.

I have also been on Adobe Kuler and been looking at various colour schemes that I could use in my website. I have been looking this first scheme which is full of neutral colours of blue and green. I personally like the colours green and blue in websites as it looks warmer than just a plain site but also looks professional as it doesn't go too extravagant with vibrancy.

I then looked at colour scheme designer, and it let me select a colour and it would pick out another colour that would compliment it. I like the colour blue and think it is a nice, clean, positive colour and looked at it to see what other colours would compliment it.

I too have looked at colorcombos.com to see if they could give me any ideas on colour schemes that I could use. After looking how Translink and Traveline have achieved neutral schemes they both have used turquoise and white with a black colour on typeface for the text areas. Below is an image of the colorcombos.com website and the way in which they implement colours.

I would like to incorporate the colour blue into a site, as I believe it is a tranquil, peaceful colour which is easy to implement into any website. Here are some colour combinations that I will be looking at in further detail as I believe that they do compliment each other very well:

Here are ome other colour schemes I have looked at which take into consideration the turquoise colour that Translink have used. I just tried them out to see if there would be any other colours that would go well with it:

I still prefer the blue colour schemes further up the page although the first turquoise scheme is quite nice and tranquil, it would give the site a sort of a peaceful and calmness about it. I then typed in purple to see what colour schemes would be brought forward to me. I personally feel that purple always compliments gold as the colours are often used together. It is a nice dark, rich colour whereas gold is bright and the contrast is just right.

You can see even in the football jersey above how well both colours go together and how one compliments the other. Below are some colour schemes for purple that I have researched in Adobe Kuler.

I will still go back to my original colour schemes as I feel that they are best to test for my website they are the following two colours below but I am not yet sure which one I will pick yet.

 I might not use all four colours in the palette but may sample one or two depending on how far I wnt to take them. I still feel that the yellow and blue look the best together and will stick by that, so I could see myself using both of those colours more than the rest.

The next thing that I have to look at is the font title. I was thinking of using a font that symbolised transport and found a transport font which is used on road signs by the Department of Transport. The font looks something like the one below. It is a clear sans-serif typeface designed for road signs in the UK.

"It was created between 1957 and 1963 by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert as part of their work as designers for the Department of Transport's Anderson and Worboys committees. All aspects of signing were investigated and tested, initially on the Preston bypass before their introduction on the M1 motorway a year later. The committee looked at examples from other European states as well as the USA but Kinneir and Calvert found them somewhat harsh and unsatisfactory. Instead, they developed a more rounded typeface with distinctive tails to 'a', 't', and 'l', and bar-less fractions, all of which helped legibility."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_(typeface)

Image courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Road.sign.arp.750pix.jpg

Image and Typeface info courtesy of http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/corporate/media/fonts/

The Johnston typeface has undergone many changes since it was developed for London Underground by Edward Johnston in 1916. It is said to be a humanist sans-serif typeface. As the font associated with London’s transport network for nearly a century, TfL is keen to ensure the Johnston family of fonts is used in a consistent and controlled way.

"Features of the font are the perfect circle of the letter O and the use of a diagonal square dot above minuscule letters i and j and for the full stop. Commas, apostrophes and other punctuation marks are also based on the diagonal square dot." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_(typeface)



Typeface Choices

"Any typeface can be specified for a website. Whether or not that face is displayed depends on whether or not it’s installed on the user’s system. The list of dependable typefaces has grown a bit though. It used to be limited to Times, Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, and Courier. But these days you can safely add George, Impact, Trebuchet and Comic Sans (though you wouldn't choose Comic Sans now would you?). I would personally add Tahoma and Lucida into that list as well. Clearly this is still a very short list compared to all the typefaces available in print. However, there's nothing stopping you from spec'ing Truesdell, Centaur, or any other typeface of superlative beauty and simply allowing the browser to substitute one of the more certain faces if the perfect typeface is not installed."

http://www.newfangled.com/website_typeface_choices

The above statement really speaks the opinion of many. Helvetica in my own opinion is probably the best typeface to use for the content of the website but for the banner/logo I still haven't found the correct typeface but it is a work in progress.