Introduction to Series of Posts on Colour.

The idea for this series of posts started at lunch one day when I made an off-hand comment about reading Hex numbers and making fast changes in my CSS file. I am somewhat new to developing for Drupal, but amid all the new information and terminology was something familiar, colour-space*. A sword that I understood how to put to use in elegant arcs within the rest of the coding I was learning.

The initial exchange started with my comment about finally seeing something I already understood and could use quickly, but how easy it was, using Hex numbers, to just change colours on a site. That led to an impromptu 15-minute teaching session. Coloured-pencils were involved and a t-shirt and a houseplant. At the end, my boss, who was on the receiving end of all this, suggested that I do a longer version for our lunchtime lecture series. That led to building a session for the upcoming Design 4 Drupal, and creating that led me to create an ongoing series of posts on colour/design/workflow and how all of those somehow influence each other within this world of site design/build and Drupal.

Drupal is a very blue world. The logo is blue (HEX#0173ba), the default build is blue, it’s a calm world with a clean design and implies, at least at the user end, precision. The admin menus are designed in shades or grey, the “block demonstration” area, also grey. Tables often have default grey borders; everywhere we look we swim in a sea of blue-grey. Add to that browser defaults that can add grey borders around our search bars. The areas of warnings are shades of orange or red, but take a minute to notice that even these, at least in Drupal basic sites, are muted. That warning you get for “module updates”, or “files not found” is never a pure hue, always somewhat diluted, transparent to a point, so that it is less jarring.

All these colours serve a purpose. The first colour of Drupal, that Drupal blue, may have started out as a whim, a guess, but whole schemes have been created based on it. Themes have a look and feel to them, in large part because of the colours that are used, the themes that have been created.

My intention for this series is an ongoing inquiry into colour, how we can understand the technical aspects of hue and all the attributes. How we can use colours to create exciting and vibrant websites that hold user’s attention and move them through the site in exciting an innovative ways. And not least, how understanding colour can make our work more interesting, more efficient and far more inspiring.

*Yes, I spell it with a "u" ;-)