Around Poynter, we often say that when it comes to using color, gray can be a designer’s best friend. A neutral, balanced gray is an important tool in your larger color palette, because it can support the natural color that comes from photographs.
I wondered how color choices played out on the Web site of The Gray Lady itself, The New York Times. In a snippet from a longer interview, here’s what NYTimes.com Design Director Khoi Vinh had to say.
Sara Quinn: What is your philosophy on color for the Times site?
Khoi Vinh: We don’t use a lot of color on the site. We try to make everything that we do conform to a very strict color palette. We actually don’t use 100 percent black. We use a very dark gray that we find is a little bit easier on the eye.
We also use a very consistent dark blue color for all of our links or clickable text. That’s really important to us, in terms of the consistency. We want the behaviors on the site to be predictable. And, with a few notable exceptions, everything is blue.
On the Times Extra part of your site, you use green as a link color on items from outside of the Times. Is that right?
Vinh: We started introducing the green with Blogrunner earlier last year when we started putting Blogrunner-generated, third party links on our section fronts. I think our Technology section front was one of the first ones. (Blogrunner is a news aggregator from The New York Times that monitors articles and blog posts and tracks news stories as they develop across the Web.)
At that time, we made a decision to use the “Blogrunner” green as a way to signal that these were links that jump off site -– which we hadn’t really done before.
So, our palette expanded from the gray and the blue to the gray, blue and green. And we have a couple of other subtle, pale tones that we use from time to time. But you know, the paper’s called The Gray Lady for a reason. We try to respect that.
