Picking The Right Shade Of Jungle Green

Green sounds like an easy color to pick for a jungle site until you actually try to use it everywhere — on buttons, on backgrounds, next to gold trim, behind carved stone. The first shade I tried read as far too bright, closer to a spring lawn than anything you'd find under a jungle canopy.

I ended up testing a good number of variations side by side against the stone grey and torch gold that make up the rest of the palette. Too dark and the whole page felt gloomy rather than warm; too light and it lost the sense of shade you'd expect from thick tree cover overhead.

The version that finally stuck sits somewhere between moss and deep leaf, with just enough warmth in it to sit comfortably next to the gold rather than fight against it. It reads calmly on a page full of text, which matters more than it sounds once you're staring at legal copy for the tenth time.

It's a small decision in the end, but color is one of those things that either feels right immediately or nags at you every time you open the site. This one, finally, stopped nagging, and I've not felt the urge to reopen the palette file since, which is about as good an endorsement as any shade of green is going to get from me.