Fought with a navy and teal combo for 3 days before figuring out my mistake

I was designing a landing page for a local coffee shop in Portland and decided on a navy background with teal accents. It looked great in my head but on screen it was a muddy mess. The teal kept disappearing into the navy and nothing popped. After messing with it for three days I finally realized my problem was contrast. Both colors have similar brightness levels so they blended together. I lightened the teal by about 30 percent and added a warm cream for highlights. Now it actually works. Has anyone else hit this kind of brightness wall where two colors just eat each other alive?

2 comments

2 Comments

rowanp1514d ago

lol of course it was the brightness level, always is. I spent two whole days tweaking a "sunset orange" and "dusty rose" combo for a friend's band poster only to realize they were literally the same value. Felt like I was losing my mind.

the_sage14d ago

so what was your fix after you realized it was a brightness issue? did you just tweak the teal or did you end up changing the whole palette around? i'm curious because i ran into a similar thing with a dark green and burgundy combo last month (for a winery website, nightmare fuel) and i found that adding a warm neutral made all the difference but i had to bump the saturation on both colors way up first. feels like you gotta treat these color families like they're all part of the same moody cousin group. did you try any other tricks before the cream highlight stuck?