How can I choose a color scheme to represent the seven HSK levels, that contrasts well on a black background with black font?

Question

HSK Standard Course textbook front covers for levels 1 through 6

In the Chinese-language-learning community, these colors are established as representing HSK (a popular Chinese exam) levels 1 through 6. Nowadays, there's a new level 7-9 (merging levels 7, 8, and 9) which doesn't have a color just yet.

I used Pinta to identify the colors in these images, and obtain:

#F9A94A #3999A7 #ED6E07 #B81D25 #253E77 #673568

I'd like this to form the basis of a color scheme. And I'll have to choose a new color for level 7-9. I intend to use this color scheme in my talk slides with a black background image. Here's what it currently looks like:

Some of the colors are too dark, and it's hard to read the characters. And I don't know if I made a good choice for the 7th color. I tried tweaking the colors manually, and it looks a bit better, but my changes seem arbitrary and don't seem to match the original color scheme.

Question: How can I choose a color scheme to represent the seven HSK levels, that contrasts well on a black background with black font?

Perhaps there's some kind of software out there that could help me balance these colors out.

Answer 1

It seems important the colors maintain being recognizable. The light and dark blue colors make it hard to change the colors too much– otherwise they will look too similar.

A couple different suggestions / ideas:

Increase the thickness of the black characters so they can be seen more easily.

Add a thin white border around the black of the character strokes so they stand out more on the different backgrounds.

Place the characters inside a light colored box surrounded by the colored box so the color can be recognized and the character can be seen and read.