Choosing Colors For Your ProBoard

[Gamoc]

Well, it is also good to use some gradients for your forum. There are some good sites that you can find on google that will help you find some good color matching. It really will help you a lot when choosing colors for your forum.

When choosing colors, it really does help if it goes with the theme of what your forum is based on. If you have a spongebob based forum, you don't want to make a fiery colored skin. It really would make members want to leave because it does not make them think of the friendly aquatic enviroment of spongebob.

It always does help to have good color matching, otherwords it could be the end of your forum. I just got a PM from someone today saying that even if the forum had some of the best content in the world, they wouldn't bother joining if it didn't have a good skin.

[Weasley Twin]

As for choosing colours I tend to use pastle colours or colours to match the skins that I use, colours that are too bright just put members off, as some have difficulty in reading the text and can make the forum look untidy, and unprofessional.

[Thundermew]

Im not all that good at choosing good colours, but its not anything like the example of bad colours given. Using a few images instead of just colours can be very useful

[Gamoc]

Well, so far I have found this to be the best color matching site around, if you go, you will see why.

www.hypergurl.com/colormatch.php

If you are going to look for some good colors for you forum, try to think of the theme. Theme seems to be very important for a lot of things. Usually, anything nice will work, but there are a lot of things that will work for most forums.

Images can be very useful when choosing colors for a forum. But if the images colors don't match, then it would still be very bad. I have seen many forums die because of bad colors or image colors. I would really not join the bad colors board that myke showed us.

[Xephyr]

I usually randomly type in crazy numbers in bg, then go off from there....so I randomly make colors for skins...>_<

[fhfreak]

Yeah I am pretty good at colors. But one of my gmods or someone at my forum changed the default skin to these awful colors that hurt my eyes, and now I can't change it back. I'm afraid that it will scare of members.

[Ivory Fangs]

Oooo, that 'Bad Colors' forum hurt my eyes bad, as yu point stated. I wonder if the skin on my Bear Forum is okay...

[Misha]

I am horrible at picking out colors for forums but the ones I do pick out match. I normally do darker colors but I find myself staying away from black. To much black is horrible on sites.

I agree on needing good matching colors. I can't stand sites that do not match or the colors should never be seen. I actually was on a site and the admin let one of the members have full control and they created the most horrible skin with a background and colors that did not go together.

Also do not know if it's my laptop trying to aggravate me but the link to the skin generator will not work for me. So if one of the mods could check it out amd make sure it is working I would be really thankful . It's probably me but if not then you need to fix it.

[§ilvermoon]

Well first Thanks for those color charts, I for sure saved them, I my self make my skins by first picking the background, then I open that little color wheel that we use for putting color on the letters on the posts, and since its a pop up, I just minimice it and open it every time I need to get a code, I do not know any color code of by heart, so I loove that color wheel(well thats what I call it)....

I Co-Admin in a couple other boards also and in couple I also do the skins, and well we tend to change the skins in somewhat often basis, like we had a Christmas themed skin, in one of the boards, then we had a cute mellow one, now he have a spring motive kind, and knowing the owner of the board by summer we will be doing another... I dont really mind doing all this, because it is experience and practice for me, but Yeah I guess that my point will be that I 100% agree that your skin could kill your board, I am lucky to have honest members that tell me when I have gone nuts and I should change the skin, and no big deal another go at it untill we are all happy, but that happened to me only couple time towards the begining of me having my board, I have it for a year now and so far so good, my members actually look forward to my skins... ;D

Have to Thank again for the great color charts

[Mr. Magic]

Well, now when it comes down to creating forums with colors, I'd rather create a whole new skin to work on, so that if there is ever a mistake, I can always delete it and try again.

One thing I like to do is to keep the default as the default and leave it as is. With the default in place, I create skins for the members to choose from if they wish. I know the default colors and all can be boring, doing this I think would just give more of a reason to join up.

But yeah, I took a look at the bad color link and my PC almost crashed that the colors were too much. Makes me think on how well I must choose colors for a particualr skin.

[Heavenly04]

I agree w/ everything thats been posted so far.
Colors are the 1st impression people get of our sites.

I hate finding a great background, then have trouble matching the colors. Recently I found this site which offers a color isolator.

all you do is upload your background & click to the different colors.
It'll give you the code for it.

www.ult-tex.net/tools/ultra/isolator.pl

[bobdat]

I usually pick a colour, such as, green for example. Then I will pick a second colour, usually a tone, so in this case, black. Then I set the window bgs to those two colours.

White is the best text for typing on those two colours, so all text becomes white. I will then change link colours to something soft, such as brown, which goes with black and green.

I then fill all the remaining bg boxes with one of my window bgs, so black here.

Then I change the thread hover thing and board hover to the same colour as the bg, so there is effectively no hover.

After, I change the forum edges colour to either black, white, or one of my bgs. I used green here.

Then I take a look at it, and, if it looks OK, I add gradients etc. If it needs tweaking, I go back and shift a couple things.

Using this method, most of my skins turn out looking pretty good!

Hope it helps.

|bobdat|

[Ќĩɳĝ]

If there is one thing that I absolutely stress about colors in a forum, it's the boards and the background blending together. Never let them blend. THis is how a background in contrast to boards should look:

Light background + Dark boards
or
Dark background + Light boards

You want your boards to stand out and look like something of interest, not just one big blob of color.

Also, never combine colors that do not flow. If you choose a color, stick to it and maybe one or two other colors. If you choose red, use a bunch of different shades of red. Etc, etc, so on and so forth.

Then, of course, though you want to contrast the boards from the background, make sure they are never too bright. I've been to forums where upon sight of the boards I thought my brain was going to explode. You don't want to hurt people's eyes.

[~SassyGurl~]

HELPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP I am spending way to much time trying to come up with the perfect skin and colour combo for my forum.That i find i am not attending to other things both on the board and in my life.
Link Removed is a parenting forum and general chat. I like the the theme of treasures but not finding things to go with it.

I really respect everyones opinions on here and kinda feel ur the professionals. can someone help guide me in the right direction on where to go with my colours and hopefully once i get the right colours I can fly with the rest of it.

Thank you in advance

[Misspresh]

I don't know why but creating a skin that works is one of my favourite things about making/redoing boards. The first board I ever created was supposed to relay on the title, so being 'Paradise', i used pastel pink/purple, and black/grey of which I've since darkened. Since those early days I now take the colour from the logo image I use for the site, using various takes on the darker shades with lighter writing, or lighter shades with darker writer.

I'd recommend using www.colorschemer.com/online.html, probably the best online colour chart I've actually come across.