I'll start off by revealing that I am constitutionally incapable of leaving my house in the wrong clothes. And by wrong clothes, I mean a color combination that is not appropriate for the day, weather, mood, and occasion. I am not someone who gets out of bed and throws any old thing on (unless I'm just going to have a shower). I look out the window, think about what I'll be doing, review my shoes, and choose an outfit in suitable colors. My color choices tend to run in cycles of about 18 months. Currently, I'm into grey. I also favor chocolate brown, moss green, and navy, all of which look terrific with grey. I haven't bought anything pastel for years. Give me the earth tones, and I'm happy.

Mind you, I like other colors. I just don't like wearing them. I'd almost rather die than be seen in yellow or orange. Bright shades of green annoy me. Black is always attractive, but I've worn black exclusively in the past, and I'm not into that any more. I love red and blue-purple tones, but I look debilitated in them, sadly. And white just isn't appropriate unless it's high summer, you're two years old, or you're in the Caribbean, thank you very much.

Naturally, since I express myself through color, I'm quite concerned with the colors for my web pages. It took me a while to settle on a terracotta, grey, and royal blue on white scheme, but I really like it. And I intend to branch out from it, but not to the extent of having garishly bright backgrounds with busy wallpaper. There's something so intrusive about a web page with a hugely complex background. It's screaming LOOK AT ME. Ugh.

The biggest beef I have with busy web page colors is dark backgrounds under muddy font colors. Blue on black? Get out of here. Black on maroon? Where's the mouse? Violent green on red? Get me my sunglasses. I'm so put off by that kind of thing that I rarely read what's on the page. It's not worth going blind over it. I wonder why people do it, too. Do they have their screen lights turned way up and not know it turns into mush at a normal level? Do they simply think the colors are pretty together, and not think about legibility? Or are they determined to use 'original' combinations, and to hell with the text?

Most layout is boring, but I can more easily forgive that. I appreciate a supremely cool background .GIF as much as the next flaneur, but it rarely works, in my humble opinion. The one place it can work is on an index page where there's not much text to choose from, just an image or two. Give me clean, spare graphics with vibrant blocks of plain colors and text that stands out, and I'll spend as much time as you could wish surfing your site.

Time to investigate doing a Hall of Shame. Au revoir.