Have you noticed Yahoo! login pages lately? They offer a pretty quick, pretty simple, and generally pretty brief lesson in design. Observe the following examples :
Apart from the (rather catchy) taglines, Yahoo! uses vibrant, every-day photos to catch your eye, and matches them with eyedropper-found colours to complete the simple, yet elegant header. This is the best way to complement a photo and transform it to something useful and attractive : use the eyedropper to sample colours from the photo, then simply create palettes for font and background colours and choose the one that suits your need.
This technique is widely used in both contemporary design and web design world, always yielding some amazing results. In general, it’s a bulletproof way to create simplistic and matching colour themes for every site, having a photo as axis. Examples of this as well as more insight can be found at Before & After Magazine website (a must-subscribe e-zine for every designer), as well as in Web Page Design for Designers (it features an excellent – eventhough old – editorial here).
web design, design, header design, colour palettes, colour schemes
one comment on this post
Will #1
12.Jan.06
I never noticed the eye-dropper aspect of the Yahoo designs. Nice observation.
- Will