color combinations

[Warrior]

hello everybody<br><br>Can anyone tell me wich color combination you should use when developing screens in your application

 

[WilMead]

Warrior, <br><br>Boy did you open a large can of worms.&nbsp;&nbsp;<br><br>There is one school that tells you stick with the system colors.&nbsp;&nbsp;Doing so gives you the same look and feel as most other applications.&nbsp;&nbsp;On the M$ platforms this means you'll look like any other M$ application.<br><br>The other school likes to color outside the lines.&nbsp;&nbsp;These are the folk who either have their own color scheme already in mind or have even gone so far to hire outside help to analize their target audiences reaction to color combinations.<br><br>If your target profile is narrow enough perhaps a little research would pay off.&nbsp;&nbsp;As you broaden your user base the first school of thought starts to pay off more and more.<br><br>My favorite solution to your problem is to let the user decide.&nbsp;&nbsp;After all, &quot;the customer is always correct.&quot;<br><br>Good luck on solving one of the toughest application design riddles of our time.<br> <p>Wil Mead<br><a href=mailto:wmead@optonline.net>wmead@optonline.net</a><br><a href= > </a><br>

 

[VB400]

<br>Two things:<br><br>I read somewhere that if you want to put the Microsoft Windows logo on your software, it must adhere to the system color scheme.&nbsp;&nbsp;This means that if the user changes the desk top color scheme then your application will change accordingly.&nbsp;&nbsp;As a programmer, this means that when you select a color for a control, choose from the &quot;System&quot; tab rather than &quot;Palette&quot; tab.<br><br>The second thing is that Quicken has a great feature (in my opinion anyway), they have a bunch of built-in color schemes that you can select from.<br><br>Maybe a combination of both features is the ultimate solution!!!<br><br>If your original inquiry was more about how to put together nice color combinations then I would like someone who is focused more on UI development to answer this question and I would also be very interested.<br>

 

[chiph]

Warrior -<br><br>I would vote to do as VB400 said.&nbsp;&nbsp;Design your app using the system set of color constants.&nbsp;&nbsp;If you have spare time, you could add the &quot;custom look&quot; feature like Quicken does.&nbsp;&nbsp;Just make sure they can get back to the set defined in the control panel.<br><br>I've actually had to troubleshoot a bug where the user had set their &quot;Window Text&quot; and &quot;Background&quot; colors to a similar value, and then reduced the palette size to 256 shades.&nbsp;&nbsp;Result was that you couldn't see <b>anything</b> on the screen!&nbsp;&nbsp;(They won the &quot;Dopey User&quot; award for that month).<br><br>Chip H.<br>