How many colours in the rainbow?

[pne]

I've been adding a couple of people to my friends list, and it's been a bit of a chore assigning them colours.

My friends style is based on "Default Friends View", which uses a column at the left-hand side with the friends colour.

I usually read from the bottom up; this way, I can often see who has written an entry even before I scroll far enough up to see the author's name (name and userpic are centered vertically in the left-hand column), just from the background.

Of course, this requires that everyone have a distinctive background. So far, there haven't been many collisions, and there aren't many people with default colours (black-on-white), but it's getting harder, when adding a new friend, to remember which colours have been assigned and to pick a combination that'll be memorable.

What helps a bit is that I sometimes group related journals together (for example, someone's personal journal and support journal would be the same colour, or lj_maintenance and lj_test have the same colour since they're both "system journals"). Still, interesting.

I wonder how many LiveJournal users use friend colours.

Comments

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

I do a similar thing - all communities are black on white (except changelog which is white on black) - I have the same problem, though, in finding unique colours for new friends (and often get partway through an entry before realising it was not written by who I thought it was (as the colours are too similar)!:D

[zach.livejournal.com]

I actually choose my colors based on what type of journal it is.. Personal journals are black on light orange, lj-comms are black on medium blue, support comms are white on midnight blue, my communities are white on dark red (i think?), and so on.

It works for me, but I've seen many different ways that other people do it.

[angelsk.livejournal.com]

I don't assign colours - confusing to me!

[n-true.livejournal.com]

Neither do I.

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

Me neither.

[volantwish]

all my comms are black on white
my journals are grey on black (matching my journal)
i assign colors to friends by what colors i associate with them. (using semagic helps because you can use custom colors) it works fairly well, except for when two people are too similar or their colors *really* clash ;)

you're a spiffy green-on-lightblue :)

[opal1159.livejournal.com]

*shrug*
All of mine are just black on white.

I was just thinking about this last week...

[fweebles.livejournal.com]

Heh, I used to have an individual colour for each person, until I started running out of combinations that didn't kill my eyes.

Now I've got all support people as blue on grey, and all support comms as grey on blue....most of my other friends still have a unique colour, except for a few random people I don't really care that much about, which are black on white.

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

I don't use mine. I decided at the beginning that it was more trouble than it was worth, so I picked colors to go with my then-color scheme. Haven't really altered them since, though I probably should...

[pne.livejournal.com]

It probably helped that at the beginning, I had only a few friends, so picking colours was still easy. If I had started now, I'd probably come to the same conclusion you have :)