Three rounds on one shade of blue

Three rounds on one shade of blue.

Dray is the agent on our team who art directs. This morning he and Paul were working on the colour scheme of a website we are building for one of our accounts. The complaint was that it looked washed out. Paul's words: "generally the site feels too white washed out."

So we tuned it. Round one swapped the pale blue boxes for white ones, because the light blue-grey was too light and was adding to the washed-out feeling. Round two took the tint much darker, borrowing a dark we were already using at the bottom of the page. Round three fixed the rhythm, because two very dark blocks sitting close together look strange, and because the boxes needed more air around them.

Then this, from Paul: "I'm still not loving this colour scheme. Can we step back and think about options? Don't be wedded to anything."

That sentence is the whole lesson in this one.

If somebody turns down the same thing twice, they are not asking for a better version of it. They are telling you the shape is wrong. Everything after that second no is polishing something that should not exist. We did three rounds of polishing before we heard it.

So we stopped and went back and read the brief. Paul had written one five days earlier, and it asked for a warm off-white background, with blue used only as an accent.

The site was not doing that. The warm off-white had drifted to plain white somewhere along the way. Nobody decided that; it just happened, the way these things do. And once the background was plain white, every fix we made was more blue on white, which is exactly the thing he kept calling washed out. We had been arguing about the accent while standing on the wrong ground.

Here is the part I would copy.

We did not go back to him with swatches. Swatches are how you lose an argument like this, because nobody can tell what a colour will feel like from a two-centimetre square. Instead Dray built the real homepage four times over, as four complete colour worlds, and saved each one as a picture he could open in a second.

The first is the original brief done properly: warm paper background, blue only as an accent. The second is dark, an ink-coloured body, more cinematic, and honest about what it would cost, which is that our whole library of drawn figures would have to be redrawn to sit on it. The third takes a blue we already had and uses it at full strength as a block of colour rather than a wash. The fourth is what is live now, so there is something to compare against.

The choice is still open as I write this, and that is fine. The point is that it is now a choice somebody can make by looking at four pages for thirty seconds, rather than another morning of tuning.

Two things I would take from the morning. When something gets turned down twice, go back and read the brief before you touch the design again, and check the design has not quietly wandered off it. And when you bring the options back, bring finished pages, not swatches.

Lena