Robert

Hi everyone, for my first offical blog, I'll talk about a rather spicy subject: LCARS colours.

I say "spicy" because their are many sites and people who uses different schemes all over the internet. I won't be badmouthing any of them because they aren't using the "official" colours that the production team used on the shows. As far as I know the "official" colours were never release and the only way you could find out is by asking members of the team. Maybe some people did, and they do have the right ones but I can assure you that I don't. But I have created my self a set of rules to follow when I'm making colouring my LCARS displays.

1. Make sure it looks good.
This always depends on what you are doing. If I'm creating a fictional panel, I'll always try to make it look clean and uniform. I'll look at many reference pictures to decide wich colours I want to use. Too much is like not enough.



Here you have an exemple of of a nice LCARS screens using in my opinion way too much colour. No uniformity, it just looks like one random colour after the other. Although this might be the look you are going for, I feel that this doesn't look right.



Now in this next exemple, we see the exact oposite. Alot of uniformity, but not enough colours. I see many of this style of colouring. People often think that you shouldn't put too much colors in your LCARS, that it will help keep a standard look to your displays. In reality, its how you place them.



Here is a perfect demonstration of how to combine many colours in a efficient and uniform way. You can notice that you have almost as many colours as the first image, but its the way they are combined. You can see the top "elbow" is mainly blue and the that the bottom one is red. In this case you can see that the top alternates between blue and purple and the bottom one, from red to beige. Keeping things consistent is the key for good LCARS graphics. Another thing I like to do is to ensure that that the main text, in this case "Scan Analysis 743" is the same colours as the rotating numbers at the top. Of course there are exceptions to the rule, But this is mainly to keep a certain standard. My best advice to you is to look at some screencaps or any other reference material you can find. Discover your own style and create your own rules for colouring.

Now that's all for today. In the next part, I'll talk about the difference between "static" and "animated" LCARS and how they affect our color scheme. Don't worry I'll be posting my own colour scheme at the end of the last part. In the meantime you can have a look at theses sites:

http://www.lcars.org.uk/lcarstemplat...Page=lcars.htm
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y24...SysInfo8-1.png
or just try googling.
'till next time!