I have mild colourblindness

which means I can’t even do the one thing I’m vaguely good at - web design. I pick colours that look good to me but shit to the majority of people. Unbelievable.

i know you’ve mentioned this before, but can we have some examples of good-to-you colours so we can see for ourselves?

I’m pretty badly colourblind. Great fun when I’m trying to pick out clothes, or paint, or trying to play snooker. Doesn’t really affect my quality of life I think.

This red looks alright to me: http://i.imgur.com/DH7cgcx.png

looks too red/saturated for everyone else

What colour does the top bar look to you?

Would you say the main section is cool or warm toned red?

it looks pale to me. the header bar is a neutral salmon, too.

Top bar looks…

#salmon pink

Main bit looks like an off-red, slightly desaturated and lighter than red. Like it’s got a bit of peach in its family tree somewhere but its looking at a map about to set off for a caravanning holiday on the isle of pink.

1 Like

I have mild colourblindness too, but I work in the design field. I pass those dot tests because I can distinguish between green and red no problem, but for example red and orange can look too similar to me. Lighting and the texture of the object make a massive difference though. When I was a kid I had to go to several sessions at the eye hospital and do all these tests, and they just said in the end “basically, you’ll be fine, just don’t try to sign up to be a pilot”.

It’s never been an issue in my work though. In fact I’ve worked in the past making colour charts as part of doing art supply catalogues, and so much colour correction of photographs. I guess because I know it’s a weakness I’m really careful about colours. I also like to use the sample tool to pick colours out of source material like photographs etc rather than just pick something out of the huge colour palette.

People with perfect colour vision also choose dodgy colour schemes though. Colour theory and using colour well is something that you can study though.

yeah me too. am i colourblind?

Yep, same. Colours radically change appearance depending on what they’re put next to though. So even if you made that red background “background-color: red;” so it was just the pure simple CSS red, the salmon pink would change its appearance dramatically. Try changing the top bar to different colours and see what I mean.

So basically I think it’s a thing you can fix through studying colour theory/experimenting more with different colour schemes. It’s something that’s covered a lot at art college, but prob not so much in web design.

that’s not really going to be a problem is it? if you’re designing a website for someone they’ll probably tell you what colours they want or at least want to choose from some options. and if not just get someone else to take a quick look and make sure it looks alright/stick to colours you can see well

Yeah weirdly I’ve always thought choosing colours was one of my strengths despite having a deficiency. Seen people choose horrible colours that are totally clueless without using a predefined colour scheme from somewhere, like the visual equivalent of singing out of tune. I don’t think I do that because I’m great and brilliant haha I just don’t realise how saturated some colours are sometimes haha

Maybe? Can any confirmed non-colourblind people tell me if the red is too vibrant

Everyone turn fl.ux off and get your willies out!

Adobe have a free app now, that lets you take photos of things you like the colours of, then it picks out the principal ones (or you can do it manually), then saves them as a colour palette for use in their applications. If you have CC I think it even automatically syncs with your computer (I’m a cheapskate who still uses CS6 at home)

looks like slightly desaturated pinkish red to me but probably depends on people’s screen

2 Likes

Oh yeah, also that’s one of the reasons why the design industry tends to use macs and spend a fortune on pantone books if they’re working in print too- every PC can have totally different colours on screen, whereas calibrated mac screens are much more consistent.

could be worse, could be normal colourblindness