Graphic Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Graphic Design professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The palette consists of blue, green, purple, red, orange, yellow, and cyan.
I've been trying to generate background colors based on the most prevalent color on the play field but it doesn't look very good. I could always use black or a dark gray but I was curious if anyone had other ideas.
The thing in Tetris is the blocks are... blocks. There's a nice bevel that allows the color to go darker at the edge and then there's a highlight at the "top of the bevel." As well as a lighter section right at the top of the square.
These are not just there for no reason. They make it much easier to see over diverse backgrounds. Even if we sample an exact color (in this case the Cyan) we can still see the Cyan blocks because of the dark and light edges:
While I wouldn't suggest anything that bright, if we adjust the lightness we can quickly see how easy this is to match (all I did was drop the Lightness):
Likewise nearly any dark color could work:
The darker or lighter you go the easier it is to see, and people don't generally like looking at bright things but it does work both ways:
While going almost but not quite to black so we can still have some color:
That bevel and emboss is what really allows you to use any background color. So yes I would say add them and then you can use pretty much any background you want.
Besides seconding Ryan's answer, I'd like to point out that colours work best if you create them from one of the existing ones in the palette by adding some white or black.
You can easily do this in any graphics editor that supports the HSB colour model by eyedropping the colour you want to work from and then setting your colour picker to HSB. In Photoshop, you do this by clicking the 'H' radio button:
I have taken the green from the 'S' shape and added some black to it by decreasing the B(rightness) and S(aturation) values and keeping the H(ue) value identical. As you can see, that colour harmonises with the existing colours nicely.
Any colours that have the same H value (and different S and B values) naturally harmonise. You can click anywhere in the big square for a harmonising colour.
