Looks fine to me

[andrewducker]

Here you will find colourmatch, which takes a selected colour and gives you other colours that go well with it. I'm most impressed by how well it works - and I wonder what this tells us about the way the human eye/mind perceives colours.

Comments

[davecleghorn.livejournal.com]

Andy, that’s brilliant. All the shades compliment each other. Be using that for the site I’m working on.

Cheers

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, what colours 'go' together is a purely mechanical function of the primary colour mix of which they are composed. I assume that this site uses the primary colours for light (red/green/blue) since it is displayed on a monitor. For pigment you would use red/yellow/blue.

Colurs 'go' depending on what they have in common, so (I'll talk pigment rather than light as that is what I am most familiar with, but the principle still applies).

red+yellow = orange
red+blue = purple
blue+yellow = green

Browns come from a mix of all three.

With pigment you can also add white or black (tricker with light, at least I couldn't effectively explain it)

Two colours will 'clash' (not 'go') if they have no primary colour in common. (kind of like chords have to have a note in common to make them sound good coming one after the other).
eg. yellow and purple, blue and orange, red and green.

These colour pairings are those which are each others afterimage (stare at a red (printed) square for a bit then look at a white piece of paper and you get a green afterimage) which causes each colour to look far more intense when next to each other (presumably due to the fact that we move our eyes a lot without being aware of it).

Pure primary colours are Ok together (if a bit bold and unimaginative a colour scheme IMHO).

Of course human taste can override this and like stuff that tecnhically clashes (I quite like yellow and purple together, personally).

I'm constantly surprised that most people don't seem to know how colours are mixed from primary clours and which makes which. (I can only suppose that I messed around with paints and optical effects more than most kids, and am a person who always looks for laws/principles in how stuff works).