Help:Using colours

To use a colour in a template or table you can use the hex triplet (e.g. bronze is #CD7F32) or HTML color names (e.g. red).

Editors are encouraged to make use of Brewer palettes for charts, maps, and other entities, using this tool.

Overriding font colour
To make a word have colour, use:

Note that you can't use the British spelling, "colour", in this context.

Examples:
 * shows as red writing
 * shows as green writing
 * shows as blue writing

Template font colour
Template:Font color, or its redirect Template:Font colour, can also be used.

Colour generation guide
The 3 colours are generated using the HSV colour space, then translated into RGB.
 * The method used for selecting the colours for various top-level pages, e.g. Main Page, Community Portal, Contents, and Help:Contents.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia uses this colour scheme on its Main Page.

Note: the colour for the border of the lighter boxes is also the colour of the backgrounds of the darker (title) boxes.

And additionally on the Community Portal:

Additional 3-colour palettes using this same generation scheme are at the top of the talk page. In the Monobook skin, the background colour of Wikipedia pages is #F8FCFF. In the Vector skin, the background colour on all pages is #FFFFFF.

Commons
The Wikimedia Commons uses this colour scheme on commons:Main Page and commons:Help:Contents. Differing from the English Wikipedia, Commons does not use an extra, darker colour for bordering the header. Also, the colour sets are not derived from a hue the way the above table does.

Schemes for colour-blind readers
Approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women with Northern European ancestry have red-green colour blindness; this and other types affect people worldwide. This table shows "safe" groups of colours which are distinguishable to most colour-blind people, although colour should never be used as the sole method to convey information.

See also Commons:Commons:Creating accessible illustrations for color blind friendly palettes.


 * Pick a maximum of one colour from each column. Do not use more than one colour from any one column.
 * Use large expanses of the colour. If you're colouring text, use bold and a large font.
 * For small expanses of colour, such as thin lines, clearly label them with text, or use non-colour techniques such as font styles (bold or italic), line styles (dots and dashes) or cross-hatching (stripes, checkers or polka-dots).
 * Use bright mid-range colours, like children's crayons. Do not use light or dark variants of the colours.
 * If you need more colours... hard luck. Instead use non-colour techniques such as labelling, font styles (bold or italic), line styles (dots and dashes) or cross-hatching (stripes, checkers or polka-dots).
 * If you are colour-blind yourself, check your revised image with a colour-sighted person to confirm the meaning is intact.

The following utilities may be of use in determining whether a revised image is distinguishable to colour-blind users. Typically they take a web page or image file as an input, and render a colour-blind simulated image as output:
 * Mozilla Firefox color-blind addons
 * Sim Daltonism simulates color blind vision and displays the results in a floating palette for macOS and iOS. Freeware.
 * Color Oracle downloadable, free color blindness simulator for Windows, Mac and Linux. Freeware.

Colour ramps
The standard rainbow should not be used to represent continuous data, because it creates artificial thresholds; humans do not see the spectrum as a smooth ramp. Greyscales, or a perceptually-even colour ramps, or a colour map chosen to deliberately highlight certain features, are preferable. Diverging colour ramps (two colour extremes around a white or black neutral value) tend to hide some high-frequency features.

Colours have cultural connotations; pick ones that match your data. That is, a diverging colour ramp with extremes " hot, cold " will be easier to understand than the reverse ( hot , cold ).



Templates

 * To colour text and background:
 * Template:Font color
 * To provide example squares of colour:
 * Template:Color sample
 * Template:Swatch
 * Template:Swatch inline

Related help pages

 * Manual of Style/Accessibility/Colors
 * Help:How to reduce colors for saving a JPEG as PNG
 * Help:Link color
 * Help:Displaying a formula
 * Infobox colours – inactive
 * WikiProject Usability/Color – inactive
 * WikiProject Usability/Color – inactive

Somewhat related pages

 * Template standardisation
 * WikiProject Color
 * WikiProject Color

Encyclopedia articles

 * Colour picker
 * Web colours

Lists of colours

 * Lists of colours
 * Template that list colours
 * Colornames
 * Formula Supported Named Colors
 * X11 color chart
 * Web Colors