practically most used background colors in web design

Question

I'm customizing a color picker's default showing colors which will be used as background colors. I'm wondering if there is a collection of the colors that are particularly useful in practical web design. Like nobody(hopefully) would use #f00 as a 100%-width page's background color while #fff is a universally usable one, there's DO'S and DONT's when it comes to picking background colors. So what are the candidates in your opinion?

I know this could be subjective, but generally I believe there IS a solid set of them.

[edit] : I kinda have an idea to customize the color picker in a logic way, first pick a buch of hues, them for each hue, start from the possible lightest of saturation to the possible heaviest. A bit demenstration:

gray [ #eee, #ccc, #ddd, .... ]

green [ ... .... ... .... ]

blue ....

yellow

brown [

Answer 1

As for a realistic answer, #fff won the race, right? Sometimes you'll see shades of gray, #eee, #eaeaea, and an occ. #000.

If you want to mix things up, I'd recommend checking out http://kuler.adobe.com/ to get an idea for what's popular, but perhaps slightly different. It's fun to experiment with the palettes up there.

Answer 2

I don't think there is a universal standard for picking up colors for your site. It entirely depends on the nature of the site and the kind of users that visit the site.

For eg: it would be nice to give a greenish color for a site that's theme is nature.

Here is a nice site in which you can choose color combinations and get a preview of that in a single click.

Color Scheme Designer

Never choose a color that will distract the user from seeing the actual contents of the site.

If you allow users to select the color then it would be nice to show them a preview of the site with the colors they have chosen.

Answer 3

Contrast is what really matters when choosing background/foreground colours, so they're likely to be very light, or very dark

so you'll need light and dark variants. i'd probably opt for:

light red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet

and dark as above

maybe the same for some earthy type tones, browns, greys, etc.

Answer 4

If you like colours like I do, you might visit ColourLovers. They've got some great ways of choosing colours, and colour schemes. The website trends section might be interesting to you.

I personally like schemes where the lighter colour is not pure white. Pure white can be sometimes harsh when reading lots of text.

Answer 5

1. Creativity is BREAKING the rules.

It is possible that a seemingly bad color combination, if used in right proportions, can actually look good, so there is no such thing as a bad color combination, it also matters on the shades, difference in colors.

Believe it or not, i own a site (www.salvin.in) where user can change the background color to many different choices and it still manages to look good *ahem in most of the cases.

There are a few things that i suggest you to look into:

1. Color wheel
2. Color harmonies
3. Triads and Tetras
4. Mono chromes (with contrasting shades)
5. Complimentaries

Answer 6

I find that #000 messes up my eyes. After looking at mainly #FFF pages/applications, then switch to #000, then when I go back to anything else, it take a while for my eyes to adjust. I vote "no" to #000.