Matt Ridley's erudite, engaging book describes a dynamic he calls the Red Queen. It means striving just to keep from losing ground. He points out that in some endeavors, success cannot accumulate. Ridley develops this concept to explain many interesting phenomena, including sex and intelligence. Excellent book, by the way.
Here I'd like to use the Red Queen concept to describe what goes on in your psyche when you color your website, and its relationship with what goes on in the psyches of your users when color makes an impression on them. For one thing, I think the same things go on when you get choosy about what to wear, and when someone looks you over from head to toe. We're designed to check each other out, as well as to give each other something to check out.
The diversity of cultures and personal values is merely part of the backdrop. At the fore is an individual struggle to stand out, to decorate and adorn so as to maximize appeal. Appeal to whom and for what are different subjects. But undeniably, fashion is about showing off.
Seeking great color for a website is also a Red-Queen race. It's about standing out among numerous others vying for user attention. Color that's effective on one popular site is usually avoided on others.
Color theory is merely the backdrop. At the fore is individual ability to come up with colors that appear to be associated with skill and value.
Undeniably, color choice for a website (beyond the rare application of color-as-information) is about showing off.
People show off in many ways besides clothing of course; wit, altruism, aggressiveness, conspicuous consumption, righteousness, savvy, nonconformism, unconventional ideas, and e-zine articles to name a few. A website shows off in a lot of ways other than its choice of colors, usually by using the following techniques: difficult graphics effects, tricky animations, catchy background midi's, sarcasm, outrage, righteous indignation, unconventional layout, trash compaction, smiling nubility, smarmy platitudes, obsequiousness toward customers.
If you decide it's important for your site to make a great impression, and you choose to show off with color, I have a few suggestions.
The color game, like the fashion game, has two facets: the judgment and the struggle. The judgment is a quick opinion, an impression. The struggle is to make a good impression, or--and this is key--to make a better impression than others are making.
Ever since people began fabricating color (working with dyes and pigments as opposed to merely perceiving color in flora, fauna, faces) it has played a part in numerous Red Queen effects. From house paint to hair color to printed money, wherever color is a challenge to produce, the Red Queen makes a competitive arena out of it, a forum for showing off. You inherit the desire to impress using color right along with a tremendously refined and intricate capacity to be impressed by color. Judgment and struggle are packaged together. Use one to crack the other, that's my central message here. Harness your innate ability to perceive great color in order to find impressive colors for your website.
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