Color Matching

Red and Green

If I ask you, “What is the match of red color?”. If you Indonesian, maybe you’ll answer “White”, remembering of Indonesian’s Flag Country (Red & White). “No, it’s black!”, if you gothician (hey, what is that word mean?? lol..). But, is that white and black matching? So?

I can’t say that they both wrong. That’s what called “Taste”. Different people, different taste. I’ve seen red color matched with many color in many object. White, black, blue, yellow, green, pink. Depends on their product themes or shapes. Or maybe they make miserable match color to make their trademark, or to make their product easy to remember for their customer. Marketing bussiness.

Do you know that red’s (web color: FF0000) best match is green? See the image on the begining of this article. But what kind of green? There is a lot of green. Green-leaf, green-sea, green-army, green-weed, etc. Don’t forget about the contrast and brightness. “Whew, why it become so hard?” Yes, color matching is not easy. But I can say, it’s not as hard as you think.

It’s easier if you use web color names for pick a color. Example red for FF0000, green for 00FF00, blue for 0000FF. Three basic color RGB (Red Green Blue) represent for the name color for web in hexadecimal format (a hex triplet).

A hex triplet is a six-digit, three-byte hexadecimal number used in HTML, CSS, SVG, and other computing applications, to represent colors. The bytes represent the red, green and blue components of the color. One byte represents a number in the range 00 to FF (in hexadecimal notation), or 0 to 255 in decimal notation. This represents the least (0) to the most (255) intensity of each of the color components. The hex triplet is formed by concatenating three bytes in hexadecimal notation, in the following order:

Byte 1: red value (color type red)
Byte 2: green value (color type green)
Byte 3: blue value (color type blue)

For example, consider the color where the red/green/blue values are decimal numbers: red=36, green=104, blue=160 (a greyish-blue color). The decimal numbers 36, 104 and 160 are equivalent to the hexadecimal numbers 24, 68 and A0 respectively. The hex triplet is obtained by concatenating the 6 hexadecimal digits together, 2468A0 in this example.

Note that if any one of the three color values is less than 16 (decimal) or 10 (hex), it must be represented with a leading zero so that the triplet always has exactly six digits. For example, the decimal triplet 4, 8, 16 would be represented by the hex digits 04, 08, 10, forming the hex triplet 040810.

The number of colors that can be represented by this system is

256 x 256 x 256 = 16,777,216

An abbreviated, three (hexadecimal) digit form is sometimes used. Expanding this form to the six-digit form is as simple as doubling each digit: 09C becomes 0099CC. This allows each color value to cover its full range from 00 to FF. The three-digit form is described in the CSS specification, not in HTML. As a result, the three digit form in an attribute other than “style” is not interpreted as a valid color in some browsers

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors

Now, we back to what green is the best match for red (FF0000)? If you see the image on the beginning of this post, the biggest area red color is FF0000 and the widest area green color at the center is 00CC00. How I can get that? I get that match from http://colorschemedesigner.com. There you can matching any of your favorite first color to make a beautiful matching color. I have no idea how it works, but I satisfied with the result.

There is some similar sites that will help you to match a color :