Maybe it's the little kid in me, but I always enjoy the chance to add colors to anything that I'm working - whether its Word documents, websites, walls, or even my mailbox garden. With so many colors to choose from, it's a great way to express your personality; but it's also easy to get carried away and to be irresponsible in your color selection, which results in a loss of effectiveness in what you’re doing.
It's probably the reason why I end up correcting the same mistakes whenever I look at someone's brochure, a flyer, a newsletter, or any document that has color text. The following article represents the basic guidelines I follow in regard to color documents:
The Right Way to Use Text Colors
When I wrote this article, I was tempted to add one more guideline in relation to color selection; but I decided not to at the last second. In my many years of using colors on the computer, it seems that there are certain colors that I stay away from simply because they never work in any of the documents I create; but that doesn't mean that they won't work for other documents, so I left that part out.
I sure I could submit a post on someday; for now, I think it's important to point out that just because you like a particular color that doesn't mean it's going to work for a document. As I've mentioned before (and will again), the goal is to make it work for the reader, not you. Keeping this in mind should lead you to the color scheme that's right. That, my friend, is what it means to be responsible in your document design.