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Introduction

Layout

Branding

Captions

Captures

Branding Issues

Fonts and Colors

The tool applications included in SWC were all to use the same look and feel in order to give the application suite a coherent feel. Before I started on the project, the team had already decided on a color palette and a font style.

Color Palette

A color palette of three colors, as shown below, was selected.

A swatch of SWC red. It's RGB value is 191,0,0.

Figure 1.
SWC red, RGB value is (191 0 0).

A swatch of SWC white. It's RGB value is 255,255,238

Figure 2.
SWC white, RGB value is (255 255 238).

A swatch of SWC blue. It's RGB value is 128,191,191

Figure 3.
SWC blue, RGB value is (128 191 191).

Unfortunately, those colors would not reproduce correctly during recording. As stated before, the screen resolution at which the movies were recorded was set at 256 colors. As a result, the selected look and feel colors would either shift or dither. The color problem was even more complicated as Lotus ScreenCam only allowed a user to use the 16 Windows colors for creating the caption boxes.

Color Palette Substitution

In order to maintain look and feel, I needed to select colors, from the Windows 16 color palette, that were as close as possible to the original look and feel colors. The SWC red and white colors had a close match in the Windows palette. The SWC blue was more difficult match. In some cases I had to use Windows Teal, in other places I had to use a "composite" color as described below.

A comparison of the SWC red and the substituted red. The substituted red is much darker in value.

Figure 4.
(Left)SWC red (Right)Red substitution

A comparison of the SWC white and the substituted white. They are esentially the same.

Figure 5.
(Left)SWC white (Right)White substitution

A comparison of the SWC blue and the substituted blues. The substituted blue (both solid and composit) are darker in value than the original blue.

Figure 6.
(Left) SWC blue (Center) Blue substitution (Right)composite blue

The composite blue was created using a technique I read about in one of Lynda Weinman's books on web graphics.

Font Selection

The team wanted a font that had a handwritten feel so Comic Sans was selected. This selection was made before I joined the team and, unfortunately, before anyone created any prototype movies. The Comic Sans typeface has a very curved style and retaining this style while drawing this on screen would require aliasing. ScreenCam does not alias text. As a result the text in the caption boxes does not appear to be Comic Sans and looks somewhat blocky. A better choice would have been Arial or Helvetica.

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