Which color ?

Which color ?

One thing on which anybody can pass a comment so easily is on color preference. It's purely grasped on individuals perception & taste. The beauty of this lovely element is, choices regarding color often seem rather mystical, as many seem to base decisions just on "it looks right." Color is such an universal thingy immaterial of color blindness, Ofcourse includes black & white.

• This link color thingie has come up again and again for me too. The first time was while I worked at IBM on a project called PartnerInfo which later morphed into the engine which powers the ibm.com e-commerce web site. "We can't have red links", came the cry from marketing. "Red is the Digital (Equipment Corporation) colors! We're blue! They're red!" Do I hear anyone say, "fighting the last war"? The second time was when I was at Sprint and it was deja vu all over again. "We can't have blue links!", came the cry from Marketing Communications. "We're red, silver and black. We're Sprint!" This old saw ground back and forth between the usability engineers in the user experience team and the mar comm people for months. "Blue is ATT" they would say. Wait a minute, don't you mean Cingular? But they're orange, right? No, Orange is a UK carrier, owned by France Telecom. No, they call it Orange France now! No, France isn't orange, that's Holland. France is red, white and blue - touché, the correct colors to use on a web site. Ah the French were correct all this time.

: Was reading this interesting color experience from David Anderson today.

Pun followed read, but in actual design context I've faced this situation many times. Hard negotiations with corporate marketing, business analysts & architecture team is the order of the day - unless a strong design or a branding design guidelines document is in place.

>> Read more on 'Color Deja Vu' from David J. Anderson