Found it, liked it | Color Scheme

Have you ever walked into a room that made you feel cold, even on a sunny day? Or perhaps a place where you feel cosy and comfortable no matter how horrible the weather was outside?

I'd bet a large part of it was due to colour. It might seem obvious to the designers, artists and decorators out there, but if you're not immersed in colour theory as part of your work, the influence of colour on mood and environment isn't necessarily an obvious one.

Colour Wheel

The colour wheel on the right should be familiar to most people. We've all been exposed to the basics of colours and how they interact in primary school when you did your first painting in art class.

But when it comes to choosing a colour scheme for your living areas, your website or anything else for that matter, we all tend to gravitate towards colours that speak to us. Taste in colour is as different from one person to the next as a fingerprint. True - our choices can be influenced by external factors, but time and time again, we move back to the ones that appeal to us.

So why should you be aware of the influence of colour? It's simple. Something that appeals to you as a person, might not appeal to the visitors to your website or the person looking at your product catalogue. Uh-oh ... so even before they read a single word of your brilliant copy, they've formed an opinion based purely on colour.

There has been hundreds, if not thousands of books and websites published on colour, colour theory, choosing colour schemes and the like. But if you're just looking for a colour scheme for your website or marketing brochure, trawling through all of that seems to be a bit much.

Trying to cater for the hundreds of different tastes would be a nightmare of epic proportions. Hence the need for a bit of shrewdness and savvy when it comes to choosing your colour schemes.

The key concept here - no matter which colours appeal to you - is ‘Harmony'. Do your colours work together to give the reader a good experience? Do they complement or detract from your product offering? Do they draw people in or push them away? These are just some of the questions that go into making colour work for you.

The medium you work in also has an influence on colour choices. Is it for on-screen viewing or a printed brochure? But that is an article all on its own.

As a web designer and computer graphic artist, most of my work is for on-screen viewing. Therefore, I need to make sure that whatever design I come up with doesn't make your eyes bleed when you look at it. But it's right here where the first hurdle needs to be overcome.

Web Safe Colour Palette

The image above is the standard 216 colour ‘web safe' palette. Even with 216 colours available to me as a web designer, the format it's presented in often leaves me going ‘huh ... where do I start?'. From a personal perspective, very few of those web safe colours appeal to me. And from bitter experience I know that if I'm working with something I don't like, it impedes the creative process and I spend days on trying to get the design to work. With monitors now able to display ‘millions of colours', I'm no longer limited to just working with those 216 web safe ones.

And here's my little secret: I turn to Mother Nature for inspiration. I have never seen a landscape that didn't work in colour harmony. Whether it's a stormy desert or a tranquil ocean, a field of wild flowers or even an urban setting, the colours you see around there work together in a manner that is difficult to just thumb-suck out of the nothing.

This is how I do it.

Step 1: Find an image or photograph that you like

There are many sources of images and photographs on the web. Google Image Search or even the search on a stock photography website will in all likelihood present you with at least one image that appeals to you. There's no need to dissect and analyse why it works ... just go with your instinct.

Once you've found an image, copy it to your computer. We are not going to use the image in our design; it's only as there as an inspiration for choosing a colour scheme. If you are going to be using the image itself, ensure that it is not copyrighted or that you have a license to use it in your work.

Step 2: Picking colours using the Eye Dropper tool and Zoom feature in Photoshop

Here's an example of an image that inspired the colour scheme below it. That's right - 33 colours that I can mix and match to create a design that works together.

But wait! The image is all oranges and yellows, where did all the other colours come from? It's for this very reason that I use photographs for inspiration. Even if the overall look of the image above is warm and sunny, there are hundreds of shades and colours hidden in it that work together.

My secret weapons: The Zoom feature and Eyedropper Tool in Photoshop.

If we zoom in to the maximum level on the image above (1800%), small colour details that are hidden from obvious view are revealed.

See? There is a smidgen of green in the flower image that we wouldn't notice if we hadn't zoomed in. Of course, I could have randomly chosen a green from the colour wheel and hope like hell that it worked with the general hues and tones of the oranges and yellows in the image, but unless you have a really good feel for colour, this is usually a hit-and-miss operation.

So that splash of green gave me the first 3 colours in the top bar of my colour scheme.

Next, I zoomed out again and picked colours from the image - some yellows, oranges and browns from different areas on the image. As these are the overall colours of the photograph, I decided to pick a range of colours shading from light yellow to orange to give me a nice overall representation.

In the final step, I zoomed in on some of the darker areas of the image to find the reds and browns that make up the last couple of colours on the top bar. Once I've picked a colour from the image with the eyedropper tool, I create a new layer named ‘colourscheme' and colour in a block of that colour I picked.

At the end of this process, I usually have about 16 to 20 colours from the image on a separate layer.

Step 3: Building the colour scheme

Now that you've got your range of colours, it's a matter of personal preference about how many colours you finally end up in your scheme.

Take a look at your blocks of colours. You'll usually see one or two that don't quite seem to fit the overall ‘feel' of the scheme - those are the ones that you would typically delete from the final colour scheme.

Once your happy with the final selection of colours, duplicate the layer they're on. Now set the opacity of that duplicate layer to 50%. Voila - you now have an additional set of colours, based on the original ones that give you tones and harmonies that will work with the ones you picked from the image. And finally, duplicate the colour layer once more and set the opacity of that layer to 20%.

And there you have it - an entire palette of colours that work together.

One image, two different colours schemes

In the following colour schemes I worked with a photograph of rusted rivets. Remember, I mentioned that even an urban landscape can yield colour harmonies that work together, even if it doesn't look like something that Mother Nature would dish up.

In the image above, there is a myriad of colours spanning the entire spectrum from yellow to purple. I chose one or two colours from each colour family. But, this same image can be used to create a more monochromatic scheme with perhaps one or two alternate highlight colours.

Here, I focussed my colour choices on the blue portions of the image. For highlights, I could have gone with the greens, oranges or yellows instead of the purples and still have ended up with something usable.

As you can see, in just one image, there is the inspiration for multiple colours schemes that can work together.

Final Thoughts

Like any language, colour can either help to bring people together or push them apart. It all depends on how it's used. I've revealed my secret for creating colour schemes, but there are just as many other valid ways of getting to something that will work.

In most corporate type projects, the colours you are given to work with will be dictated by the corporate identity standards or the logos you're given. Don't despair. Even within those images, there are hidden complementary colours that can bring your work to life.

Have fun and play with it. You've got nothing to lose.

PS: And here's another colour scheme. For no other reason than the fact that I really liked the photograph *smiles*

GRiN | Issue 3 released.

Wanna know what this is? get in touch!

NIT Library | All you need to know about the insides

All the things, apparently, aren’t that apparent. And the thing applies more so to the entity which inherit this capacity either due to its hugeness, intricacy, complexity, convolution, or the simpler one; no one cares to strip open the cloth that hides the truth.

Walking up the 19 steps of the Great SVNITian ‘Central Library’, illuminated beautifully at night by 14 ornamental lamps(two of which don’t light up) you seem to get this same feeling. It’s like entering into Siberia- You know its there, but you exactly don’t know ‘what’s there’. As you stroll through the lines below, you will be surprised, dumbfounded, irritated, and informed. As to what actually lies inside that ‘love’ly building of ours……

So we enter in- you don’t have to be a Stephan hawking to understand that it’s a huge table providing you with the daily information you need in 3 languages and in totality with 8 papers. Walk through the room, give fleeting look to the computers kept (we’ll come back to it). 8 steps up we reach in the ‘MAGAZINES AND JOURNAL SECTION’ .Managed by Mr Atul Panchal, the room sits quiet and calm, housing 170 magazines. But wait!!....what are those stacks and stacks of bound black things, hid by everyone???....resembling the department of mysteries from the remains of Harry Potter’s sets, only the difference, here you have real mysteries on the stacks than prophecies! Ok, they are the bound volume of all the journals that the library ever housed. Take a look (of course with a handkerchief covering your face) and you are sure to be pleasantly surprised. A thing to note here- if you wish to add a magazine of your choice on display, just write an application to our librarian requesting him for the same, the need would be taken care of; if it’s a costly (ahem ahem..) subscription then it would adore the rack from January (yearly budget allocation you see)

Lets move back (of course 8 steps down) to main room, pass the computers again (we’ll come back to it)….pass the beeping gates (we’ll come back to it too). Reach for the basement-the area of our prime interest, either by choice or accident. Now the problem kicks in, you kind of want a needle in grass heap. Run up back to the computers, type in the name by author, by title or any of the five options. ENTER.

The number that you see, is for eg, 623.456 now this no, for a particular book remains constant all over the world. The six hundred series is for technology similarly five hundred for pure science and so on. The number after the decimal is placed taking into account the initials of the author’s name, which is also displayed below. A marvellous system all in all. So we have our stack, and thus the book. New systems are in development to ease the flow of information as to who has a book and so on. Some points to remember.

• Keep the book exactly at the place you took it from after browsing
• Never tamper the page with the tag
• Fine charges are one rupee per day
• Never keep more than three books on the KIOSK machine
• Always ‘EXIT’ don’t ‘LOGOUT’
• Forget for once that the forbidden fruit is the sweetest

Ah, the machine, it is yet another highlight feature, rather its working is. Here goes- you keep the book on the desk, it sense the tag in the book (mind you, it can sense four tags kept one on one-try fooling it now) and deactivates its reflecting properties, thus when you ‘issue’ the book legally and move out, the doors(technically known as RFID- Radio frequency Identification) don’t call for cops (in recent past when it used to, it was actually kept on trial mode) but try once to hoodwink the system and ‘steal’ a book, and you’ll have ‘the right to remain silent!’. One more such machine may adore the place soon.

Now we pick up the most deserted (or the most deserted of the more deserted(?)) region of the library- THE REFERENCE SECTION. If you for a second stand, and ponder near the issuing counter, you’ll notice that a stair leads to the upper level too (it may sound absurd for the people who frequent it, but for those who don’t….well, it’s a discovery). The section is one of the best, with books ranging from tips to bell the CAT, crack GRE, open the GATE and what not things we’ll have to get into. You can know more about India, learn french, german, and English!!-ya with such big dictionaries and sets of encyclopedias…..its a heaven. You also find all the books containing the ‘standard data’ about which we learn in class. The problem is that there is no one around to lend you the book. But we have a solution- when and ever you need a book, get to the staff present below. You’ll be personally escorted, to have your cheese and eat it too.

Coming down once again. We see a board displaying DIGITAL LIBRARY. It’s a place where at given time you do not find more than two people. Enter it, and you enter a world of knowledge. Here goes some lines about the most unused facility of our institute:

www.svnit.ac.in---->central library----->digital library.

TADA!! You see a whole list of big shots. IEEE, springers, wiley’s, ASME et all. You find papers journals, everything you could ever need to support your projects and general engineering needs, for which you always meandered google, and came out empty handed. Some of these papers costs more than 25$ and you have them free!!, the MHRD pays for them. This facility is provided to all the NITs and IITs exclusively. Take up for instance IEEE journal, you enter and log in with your ID and Password that being the same one as you use in CCC. me06647 ******* enter. And there it is, the heading “Welcome SARDAR VALLBHBHAI NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, Surat” . Once you use it you understand what amount of information you have at your disposal. To add to the charm, our librarian sir TB GOSH has created a site of his own, under the tag ‘eprints@svnit’ , I leave it for you explore.

Again some points to remember-

• This facility can be accessed even from CCC (unfortunately not from your hostel rooms)
• Use of pendrive is prohibited in the digital library, get your blank CDs
• It is unfortunate, that many people didn’t know about this, and thus not many hits were recorded, hence its plea- USE IT, atleast if not for yourself then for the people who want it. Or there may be a possibility that the MHRD backs off, and stops the subscription. As it sees itself paying Cores of rupees for thankless herd.
• With some 8000 e-books, 1061 encyclopaedias, 1800+ online journals. What else can we ask for???
• Set up the dgital library page as the homepage of your personal systems

Out of the room, there at the distance of 7 footsteps lies the CD-ROM section. All the disks are copied on the pcs there. The list of the same has been displayed. Come up and for sure have a look. Another thing is the “BOOK BANK” started for the category students, it offers books for a semester and has some 6200 titles.

It would not be fitting if we move out without meeting out dear librarian sir MR Gosh. The person behind all these developments, the man behind all the innovation, which even if unused and unthanked. continued to build up. Once you dig into the things you actually understand what it is to be a librarian. “With a devastating flood we lost 20,000 titles” he expresses his concern “but still we do have 60,000 titles”. One thing that I as student felt- the library is grossly understaffed. With new thousands of books lying just because there is no one to tag them. To this sir replies “there are no problems which can’t be solved, a bit of the co-operation more from the authorities to allot a bit more staff would very well suit all of us”. Point accepted. So here it is, we end our 50 cent tour, one hope which I personally have is- if from we have 30%(?) more public, using the facilties more by 40% (??) then the tree, out of which the paper you currently hold in your hand made, would be thankful and its cutting down would be justified. And hope by a month from now, we don’t have to use a handkerchief while browsing through stacks. “This is your institute, all these things are for you. Own it, use it” and there with the words from the librarian we have our FULLSTOP.

NIT Canteen ; a behind the scene account

Thak thak thak thak………chop chop chop….fisssshhhhhhhh….. the cacophony had been imploring itself, the door lay open and a distance darkness spread over the city…nothing decipherable. But still a tint of nostalgia was filling up inside, more of a déjà vu….suddenly everything started being clear, rather more clear- it all turned white….and the cacophony was blurred out with a high pitch tone “BEEP BEEP BEEP” it said…..Hell that was my alarm clock! And this all a freak dream...0530hrs!... and I had an appointment….i ran for it.

Thak thak thak thak………chop chop chop….fisssshhhhhhhh…..apparently the sound wasn’t that vague, here I was listening to it in the great SVNIT ian canteen at six in the morning- that being the time (or rather even before, when I was lazing around) the crew hits the ship, and it prepare its self to give everyone a ride. So here goes some thought which generated itself while I tried to get to know, that what exactly happens behind the counters in our canteen and also in the lives of our feeders!

I got in, and a familiar smiling face –Shekhar bhaiya’s, escorted to me to very corner (or wait, is it ‘middle’?) of the things. 5 men…chopping away at mach 4..making it seem that there isn’t a thing called post sleep dizziness. “there are 15 members in our family here, they begin their work at 0530hrs” informs Shekhar bhai. This time is when the ‘base of the pizza’ (if there is such an idiom) prepared. All the masala’s, chutney , and the other stuff that floods the mouth get prepared. The cold January wind gets out of the way when the big burners are set on fire. And just when I thought that all the vegetable in Surat were done away with, a new gunny bag arrives where potatoes, tomatoes, onion, et all are to meet the same fate on the platform. “This what you see is only 5% of total grocery that gets consumed up during the day” quips Shekhar bhai, yeah right…as I later learned every day we hog up 25 kg of onion, 30kg of tomatoes, 100 eggs, 35 kg of potatoes (“it’s the most popular one” says Hasmukh bhai)…I mean hello? Talk about controlled eating.

“The best thing about our staff is, that there aren’t specialists assigned to a particular job. Everyone in here is an all-rounder” brings in Shekhar bhai…”..and that is a great relief, as during peak hours-the specialist would have been doing shezvan rice, while somebody shouts away for masala utthapa” he adds. Ah… masala utthapa, I learned here that this in particular the dish that takes the longest to get done. Talking about time, I couldn’t resist my self from asking “what actually happens after someone hands out a coin and blurts out an item out of the zillions?”…..to this he replied “…well, technically you hear anand’s top notch sound, with which we all are familiar with, after that…just as the sound wave hits the cooking staff inside..a sort of contraption begins… the base masala gets together in no matter of time…the actual base of the dish gets prepared on the burner…along with the vegetables, all these steps go on simultaneously. And then they are mixed up, layed out…..and you reach again at counter…and hear anand again…hehe…its like a cyclic thermodynamic process…ends where it begins” yeah well, that was one, only that here we actually gain a lot of peripherals. “the process remains more or less the same for all the items” he informs. The fun kicks in when you actually see this happen…its like a rotating roulette. I checked the other room inside..”this is the special ‘dosa’ tawa that we have” I was updated. It kind of is imperative that we have a ‘special tawa’ for dosa. That category begin the most consumed in a day. “Masala dosa tops the chart, with rava catching up” he said, cool stats I must say.

Then there is one more angle involved…more importantly relating to Anand and Hasmukh Bhaiya, they being the ones who guard the ‘windows’ of humanity, looking out through the counters, I bet they must have seen some of the coolest glimpse of our lives. “We have seen couples hook up, break out, friends enjoying, biggest political-apolitical decisions been made, right in front of us…we have seen the freakiest to the geekiest kid in the college, all in his/her’s inner self, do we just love our jobs or what!” so now I get where they get all this energy from. “ every individual coming up the counter is different…. The style with which they order do tell a lot about them, some are party to our fun making….the others unfortunately as much distant, we just want to say one thing- what ever we say- dil pe mat le yaar “. Point accepted. Then slowly as I endeavoured Into their lives, I found another energy sources. “manoj is great singer, he sings for us most the time…accompanied by anand who is great dancer!” said hasmukh bhai… so so so, hidden talents.

Talking of staff members, its like a mini NIT in here, with 15 people all from different places, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Nepal, you name it. “its good they all know Hindi, or else we couldn’t have been serving food at all” jokes Shekhar bhai. Some of them haven’t visited their home town for past two years. “its nothing to be being sorry for, not that I don’t miss my family, but I love it here…I now even have a girlfriend in surat!” lets out karan Bhaiya. They all work like a well oiled machine with their day ending at 2130hrs. Then they generally watch TV, enjoy a chat, and cook themselves dinner! (yeah, they too eat!) “during the day, they are allowed to have anything they want, no restrictions” said Shekhar bhai. “Wow” I thought. Then there is Sunday the day they get up late, catch a movie play cricket, clean the canteen all this while we pass looking at the building with hungry eyes…but OK we understand. For many don’t know that out canteen is operational even in vacations! “its much slower then, with days feeling like composed of 48 hrs or something, we miss you kids’ says Shekhar bhai. Do we even need to reciprocate that in words?... I don’t think so.

So, this is it…the tastemakers of our lives, may we wish their life is as tasty as ours is because of them. And just one request from my side the next time you order something, take the dish away with a “thank you” or even a small smile of gratitude would do.

Quizzicals logo unleashed. Comments welcomed

Dark Blue ray

They said it was for one
But left others too soaring
The silence was gone
And noise kept roaring.
Left out were those without the energy
Since it didn’t board anyone with lethargy.
The ones left out saw sour grapes
For the rest, it was a sun blocking drape
They reached out, emulated, initiated,
Their share of dreams.
For it was the feeling as smooth as cream.
The sentiment of a free-soul, grabbed their arm
Leading them away from shackles of past failures
The went on to create a setup they liked
A kingdom of their choice
All stimulated by on streak colored light
That was the play of the ray hope…..
The dark blue ray of hope.

Life goes on | I penned this ages ago, found it on my desktop

we make every setup fall
by playing hardball
we do nothing
not even wait for a clarion call
but stiil we stay
yet we live, because....
life goes on

We love pride, instead of deed
we care price, instead of value
we flaunt ego on sleeves with no shame
and curse others for the same
still we stay
yet we live, because.....
life goes on

We want to be loved
we to be cosseted
we want to praised
we want to be raised
but still deny others the equivalent
because towards emotions we have become monovalent
still we stay
yet we live, because....
life goes on