Colour Lexicon

Red means Stop | Green means Go | White means Surrender

Our decision to use the coloured dots for categorising isn't without challenges. One of the keys to building a functional CMS site is providing users simple ways to both organise and access content. Tagging and categorizing is essential. We like to recommend to clients that they use these organisational tools even if they're not going to immediately incorporate them into the site - the data can prove invaluable down the line. That's how we've apraoached this site - we've got a bunch a bunch of additional categories tied to the content but we're just making the dots visible at this point. Once we find a functional and compelling way of using them we'll incorporate them.

In using coloured dots to represent Archinodes' areas of interest, it took some negotiation to just establish the main colours to use and which categories to associate them with - this then lead to some 'fighting' over the actual shades of these colours to use (Mél won). We also had to take into consideration which colours were more web friendly, how the colours would transfer to print, which order to arrange the colours in (no traffic lights), etc. This process revealed the engrained representation certain colours and colour sequences have in everyday life. In the end we think, we hope, the coloured dots provide users with a simple, effective and aesthetic way of navigating the site and discovering content.