Long ago (in a land far, far away??) I belonged to a group for which I studied heraldry--you know, knights' armor, coats of arms, etc. There are some heraldic rules about use of color which might be helpful to keep in mind when planning a layout.
Heraldry helped everybody tell who was who on the battle field and at tournaments. So they developed some good rules about using colors for the best visibility. They had far fewer colors they worked with but the basic principle is still valid. If you've ever done a layout and wondered why the colors don't work as well as you thought--try looking at it with the following idea in mind!
They had five basic colors they used:
The basic rule about using these was (and still is)--
Now this doesn't mean that they NEVER broke the rules when designing somebody's coat of arms but the earliest and best examples of heraldic design DID follow these rules. And although we are usually working with lots of colors and shades they didn't use, the visibility of colors against each other are still impacted by this.
Just the past day or so (as of 4/24/98) there's been a discussion on one of the boards asking about the visibility of silver and gold metallic gelly roll pens on black paper. People were commenting that the gold and silver really showed up against the black. They were actually giving perfect illustrations of what I meant here--the gold and silver metallic pens do show up well against a Color.
One lady commented that the cranberry red gelly roll pen had not shown up well on the black--it sort-of faded out--again illustrating that a Color on another Color doesn't work as well. She also said the gold and silver pens on white had faded to give a pastel effect almost. Since the white paper is so close to the silver and is nearly as close to the gold, the effect of the metal is lessened. That's why the heraldry books use white to symbolise silver and yellow to symbolise gold when they're printing the color pictures--they give pretty much the same effect as putting metallic silver on metallic gold vs putting either on a Color.
As I said above, we're not doing heraldry so the "rules" are not iron-clad but it may give you some hints on why some color combinations you thought would be great don't work out after all. I hope to be able to post some graphics demonstrating this soon. I'm working on the best way to represent this in pictures that relate to scrapbooking.
