OK, so I'm by no means a Graphic Designer. In fact, I'm really just an Adobe Photoshop hack. Anyone (not a designer) who has seen my work has probably said "That's interesting, and while I probably can't do it, this guy ain't a graphic designer."

But regardless of my lack of design skills, I want to get a standard, professional web-look for SCORE OS and I know from reading around that a good place to start is a color palette. Most websites stress that three to five color choices are best so that your website doesn't looking like a Reading Rainbow website gone wrong (apologies to Lavar Burton).

Since I have no graphic design background (should have taken Intro to Art instead of Intro to Insurance/Risk Management), I have no foundation with which to read graphic design books, and I don't have a lot of time, I'm going to try and pull this off web-style: scan some websites, pull out the info fast, and act like I know what I'm doing.

1) First I found a post on a site called Veerle's blog called "Choosing Color Combinations."

2) In the comments I found someone refer to a little app called "Color Scheme 2" on a website named WellStyled.com

3) Knowing that I want a red-white-blue type palette and that I'm utterly in-love with the green shade known as #006600, I plug in this hex-color number and select an option called "tetrad" because, well, it pops out four colors that appeal to me.

4) I was dedicated to keeping the palette colors as "web-safe," even though most computers can utilize many more colors nowadays. Why? Because I'm old school and I don't want somebody complaining how the entire SCORE OS project sucks because their browser turns everything pink. At least now I can tell that random complainer that it's obvious their Firefox browser is infected with Rainbow Malware because my colors are safe like it's 1998.

5) So, here's what the amazing color app came up with .  .  . and frankly, it looks fairly good (to me, at least):

6) The basis for the new SCORE OS color scheme is going to be the blue/red/grey shade and if we really need something added the green and brown can be thrown in.

7) So, that's all I have for today. My guess is that a few weeks down the road someone will either look at our color scheme and say "Hey, that's great! What graphic design wizard did you hire?" or "So, what? You guys read a few blogs and pulled your colors from the web?" If the former statement comes in, I'll take full credit. If the latter statement shows up, I'm going to blame Don.

Note: Below are a bunch of related colors with their hex numbers for based on the colors above. I'm just posting them because it looks important and I don't know any better at this point.

Green
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#006600

#003300

#CCFFCC

#99FF99


Red
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#660000

#330000

#FFCCCC

#FF9999


Yellow
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#663300

#333300

#FFCCCC

#FFCC99


Blue
--------------------
#003366

#003333

#CCCCFF

#99CCFF