Help:Using colours

This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus.

Shortcuts HELP:COLOR WP:COLOURS H:UC

Links should clearly be identifiable as links to readers. Refrain from implementing coloured links that may impede user ability to distinguish links from regular text, or colour links for purely aesthetic reasons. See the guides to editing articles for accessibility at contrast, accessibility and navbox colors.

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.

To make a word have colour, use: <span style="color:hex triplet or colour name">text</span>

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

Examples:

• <span style="color:red">red writing</span> shows as red writing
• <span style="color:#0f0">green writing</span> shows as green writing
• <span style="color:#0000FF">blue writing</span> shows as blue writing

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

{{Font colour|fontcolour|backgroundcolour|Your text here}}

{{font color|red|This text is different}}

{{font color|red|yellow|This text is different}}

{{font color||yellow|This text is different}}

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

Wikipedia uses this colour scheme on its Main Page.

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.

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.

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.^[1] 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.

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).

• McNeall, Doug (23 June 2015). "Picking a colour scale for scientific graphics". Better Figures.
• "Elegant Figures - Subtleties of Color (Part 1 of 6)". earthobservatory.nasa.gov. 1 February 2020.
• Rougier, Nicolas P.; Droettboom, Michael; Bourne, Philip E. (11 September 2014). "Ten Simple Rules for Better Figures". PLOS Computational Biology. 10 (9): e1003833. Bibcode:2014PLSCB..10E3833R. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003833. PMC 4161295. PMID 25210732.

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

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

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Color
• Wikipedia:Template standardisation
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Color

• Colour picker
• Web colours

• Lists of colours
• Template that list colours
  • {{Colornames}}
  • {{Formula Supported Named Colors}}
  • {{X11 color chart}}
  • {{Web Colors}}