Customer Reviews

Color Harmony for the Web: A Guide for Creating Great Color Schemes On-Line

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I was initially highly delighted with the book. An equal to any of the other books in the 'Color Harmony' range. Then I began to spot errors with the colors. Glaring errors. Where greens should have been blue, reds should have been purple and so on. Until Rockport Publishers reprints this book with the correct colors, the whole book becomes mislending, especially to novices in the field of web color.

I'm a big fan of the Color Harmony series, and I was estatic to see that they created a version for web designers. Looking through their books is always a nice way to jump-start a project - getting ideas for what palette to start with is often the toughest for me.

What I like about the book: it has a good selection of two and three color combinations, grouped by theme (professional, lively, classic, bold, etc) with the RGB and Hex codes easily available in the back of the book.

What I don't like: The color harmony series has always been bad at reproducing colors on the page exactly as they appear in CMY or RGB indexes. This book is by far the worst. Purples appear where oranges should be. Blues are entirely the wrong shade. The color reproduction for the "correct" colors is horendous and actually having wrong colors in the book is an issue that should have prompted the publisher to issue an immediate recall.

If you're willing to not look at the actual color combinations on the page and instead type in the RGB/Hex values into the computer, the colors they suggest together do actually work nicely, but this is a product that should have been recalled and reissued by the publisher or printer.

Screw the mistakes..There's a perfectly good errata addemum you can reference. This book is for the web design obsessed. It's open on my desk 90% of the time I work on a site. It's simple direct and primarily a reference book. The chapter intro's are short, well written and informational. I'm pretty savy with design but I could never come up up with these great combinations. I love this book..

The color schemes in the book are great, but, this is a big but: the RGB codes/hex codes are NOT correct. so this book is totally useless!

A webdesigner from the Netherlands

i have to revise my previous review of 4 stars as i too have noticed some big discrepancies in colour reproductions - there is one 'blue' that keeps coming out green. really, this shouldn't be allowed to get through the editing phase. unfortunately, this isn't a website (and could therefore be corrected asap) so those like me who have bought the book have to suffer. if i were the author i would feel very let down by my publisher!

A catalog of different color shemes to be used on web sites, with little explanation on how these came to be. Some of the colors in the first edition have been printed incorrect, although the 2nd edition is supposed to have the correct colors printed.

I like this book, because the concept is great and it is beautifully done. I have used it with several design projects and i find suitable colors much easier with it than my old methods. However, i would have liked a bit more text and color theory, because it is only a few pages in this book.

At the beginning of the book there is a short introduction to color theory. The book is then separated into chapters for the different moods of color and at the beginning of the chapter there are a few examples of web sites that were designed with those color moods.

Overall i give it a thumbs up, because it's a great tool if you work with colors!

This book is a wonderful resource that is deserving of 5 stars if it wasn't for the printing issues and wrong hex colors. Some colors you pick will come out completely different on screen and 10 or 20 hex colors are misnumbered.

Don't let this scare you away though. It is not difficult to match the correct colors in Photoshop using it's built-in color picker and the publishers have put up a a page on their site with corrections to the wrong hex numbers.

Overall, a great resource, but you may want to look into the Color Harmony Workbook, printed by the same publisher, as well.

The book is fantastic, in fact I got it at Borders recently but discovered it was the first printing with all the wrong colors. I returned it, then came to Amazon figuring they would have the latest edition. They don't. I ordered it here and just got it today, it is the first edition with the little supplement color correction sheet. It is too cumbersome to cross reference the colors and if I am paying for a book, I should not be expected to do that. So, very disappointed. Great book...but Amazon should have the newer version that is supposedly out there I feel.

this book has just arrived and on first glance is meeting all my needs and then some. there's pages and pages of color swatches grouped by moods, examples of how the schemes are used, an extensive color conversion chart, information about color, i could go on for a while here - it doesn't disappoint.

color harmony for the web is perfect for people who need to choose online color schemes and apply them in the right context.

maybe you're a 'do-it-yourselfer' designing your own site and have little knowledge of the how's why's and wheretofore's of color offline, let alone online - you'll find out which colors go together and what combinations are most appropriate for the mood/feelings you want to convey.

website designers could take the book on customer visits to `kick off' discussion, or it'll save you time if the choice is always yours.

my only issue was with the statement `most computer monitors can only display 256 (8 bit) colors at once'. according to thecounter.com global statistics, as of january 2001 more than 92% of monitors could display 16bit color or higher. it seems we're designing our sites for less than 8% of the browsing public who know they've got a bad monitor and probably should upgrade! call me selfish, but wouldn't the `majority' want to experience the full power of their monitor?