Peter T
7/29/2010 7:37:00 AM
There's plenty of advice out there about combining colours but I don't
recall ever seeing anything about making gradients.
I'm no colourist but a few simple things to keep in mind. The colour wheel
has already been referred to but picture it with six spokes of colours -
red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta, and back to red
Visualise too that colours will range from vivid (100% saturation) on the
outside of the wheel to grey (0% sat') in the middle.
If you draw a line through any 3 spokes, eg red to green, you'll end up with
a gradient of three colours. However the middle colour, in this case yellow,
will be a greyish yellow, ie a bit dull.
If you draw a line diagonally across the wheel the middle of the gradient
will be grey.
At least, described above is what you'll get with a linear gradient API. MS
use various algorithms to reduce the extent of grey and other compensations
for the non linear way the eye perceives colour differences (eg green is
much stronger than blue, both in terms of brightness and spread on the
colour wheel) and increase saturation of the 'middle' colour.
You won't want to get involved in that so to be on the safe side, though not
necessarily artistically imaginative, one way would be to choose pairs of
colours on adjacent spokes with luminosity about 50% (and maybe not fully
saturated colours, say about 80-90% to be slightly subtle). Also no need to
choose the exactly 'pure' six colours.
Other safe combinations are monochrome or near monochrome gradients, say a
vivid colour to a white or a contrasting lightish colour.
A very brief and incomplete intro!
Regards,
Peter T
"avi" <aviben@bezeqint.net.il> wrote in message
news:fd0a0111-6fe0-44f5-b9f4-fa8078444b77@c10g2000yqi.googlegroups.com...
> Hello,
>
> Not a VB request but a related one...
>
> I have found a nice OCX for creating vb6 gradient forms from any 2
> colors, but I want to present my users a set of predefined gradients
> templates to pick from
>
> Do you know where can I find a set of some 10 "professional" gradients
> patterns with their respective defined 2 RGB colors?
>
> I can of course experiment but do not feel to have the proper feel for
> for that
>
>
> Thanks
> Avi