Currently, club colors are one of the few visual aspects of your club that you can customize. As you look at the club page, the fact that there is a somewhat narrow navigational frame on the left and a wider body frame on the right is apparent. The navigational frame is always present regardless of the sections within your club which you are accessing. Less apparent is that there is also a title frame above the body, displaying the name of your club, that is also ever present. These three frames provide four areas to customize for color: headings, sub-headings, background, and navigational frame background, which also serves as the alternating color in the statistics area on your main body page. The colors you choose to make them conveys an overall impression of your club, an atmosphere that can suggest friendliness, attentiveness to detail, and fun. Too, your colors can suggest knowledgeability, or even a business-like approach to clubing. Conversely, however, color selection also has the ability to suggest the opposite of these qualities--sloppiness, an aloof snobbery, ignorance, and other less than inviting traits. Your color selection can be very important.

One thing you need to answer before you go any further is whether you wish to present a consistent image--one set of colors that are present week after week on both your clubsite and your club homepage that become signature. Or, whether you wish to go for variety--an ever-changing set of colors reflecting club mood or the seasons, etc. There are pros and cons for both ideas. If your club is affilliated with some off-line organization--such as a football team or school or company--perhaps your choice of color should be based on colors used by that entity to underscore the affilliation. Perhaps, you have a special logo graphic that your club colors should compliment. Keeping this sort of notion in mind will make the selection process somewhat easier.

Choosing Club Colors

Above all else club colors must have provide a medium comfortable to the eye and legible. Regardless of how attractive the combination may be, if the words get lost in the color, then the choice doesn't do a service to your club. Additionally, some colors are user specific, that is they are dependent on whether the individual user settings in the browser and monitor are compatible. While you may be using a "True Color" setting, the colors you select may dither (shift to nearest recognizable RGB combination) on viewing by another user, rendering your choices less than attractive. And finally, there is the question of contrast and compliment. Some combinations may go well together, providing a rich contrast; others may clash horrendously.

The color schemes below were designed with a 24-bit or True Color setting. They will dither slightly in 256-color but should do so consistently across all four colors. They are mainly in pastels which provide maximum contrast for the fine Arial type face used throughout Yahoo! clubs and the Windows default font colors used for links. They are presented, here, as gradiant combinations only (name designations are purely arbitrary). The hexidecimal or RBG Triplet Color code has been provided for each color shown. While these do not exhaust the potential pallette by any stretch, we hope they will prove helpful (for more information and additional color charts, click the link for colors below).