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 H:COLORH:COLOR H:UCH:UC

Links should be clearly recognizable as clickable to readers. Avoid using colored links as it may hinder the reader's ability to distinguish links from regular text, particularly coloring links solely for aesthetic purposes. See the Manual of Style accessibility guideline sections on Contrast and Color.

To use a colour in a template or table you can use the hex triplet (e.g. #CD7F32 is bronze) or HTML colour name (e.g. red).

Editors are encouraged to make use of tools, such as Color Brewer 2 to create Brewer palettes, listed at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility § Color for colour scheme selection used in graphical charts, maps, tables, and webpages with accessibility in mind for colour-blind and visually impaired users.

For colour tables and a colour pallette, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Colors. For the WikiProject, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Color.

To apply colour to text, use: <span style="color:hex triplet or colour name">text</span>

Note that you cannot use Commonwealth spellings like "colour" in HTML tags used in wikitext.

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

{{Font color}}, or its redirect {{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 3 colours are generated using the HSV colour space, then translated into RGB. This method is used for selecting the colours used in various top-level pages, such as the Main Page, Village Pumps, Community Portal, Contents, and Help:Contents.

Wikipedia uses this colour scheme on its Main Page and, for the final row, 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 2022 skin, the background colour on all pages in light mode 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.

The Wikimedia Foundation Design team has provided a colour palette with colours being marked toward level AA conformance. It is used for all user-interface elements across products and in the main Wikimedia themes, desktop and mobile. However, it does not consider linked text.

It is best to choose background colours that offer sufficient contrast in relation to text and blue links, which is also the colour of references, both of which are very common in most articles. Use the WCAG link contrast checker to ensure that the chosen background colour offers the recommended WCAG AA level of contrast against normal text (  #202122) and blue links (  #3366CC for the default Vector 2022 skin).^[1]

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.^[2] 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 colour-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's colour-blind addons
• Sim Daltonism simulates colour blind vision and displays the results in a floating palette for macOS and iOS. Freeware.
• Color Oracle downloadable, free colour 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.

You can use an online tool or software to check the colour contrast ratio:

• WebAIM contrast checker
• WhoCanUse
•  Color contrast analyser application

Before using a tool, check if it supports WCAG 2.0, as older tools based on WCAG 1.0 are outdated.

• Codex Style Guide for Wikimedia
• Chrome color contrast debugger (with a visual guide and built-in colour-picker).
• Color contrast analyser (downloadable software for precise contrast checks; be sure to only use the up-to-date "luminosity" algorithm, and not the "color brightness/difference", which is outdated.).
• Paletton (formerly Color Scheme Designer) helps select suitable colour schemes for a graphical chart.
• Color Brewer 2.0 provides colour-blind-friendly colour schemes for maps.
• Light qualitative color scheme provides a set of nine colours that work well for colour-blind users and black text labels.
• ColorFilter simulates colour-blind vision
• Coblis Color-blindness simulator
• Firefox NoCoffee

The Wikimedia Foundation Design team has provided a color palette for AA-level contrast compliance. It is used for all user-interface elements across products and in the main Wikimedia themes, desktop and mobile. However, it does not consider linked text colour.

For AAA-compliant colour pairings for different text types (black text, white text, links, and visited links), refer to the table at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Colors. For named CSS-based text colours on a white background, refer to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility/CSS colors for recommended colours

• 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}}