Hi,

Looking at my bookshelf, I can't help noticing the colours on the spine of my O'Reilly books. It appears as if there is some kind of colour scheme: perl books are blue, internet/web books are green, various programming languages are pink, and the nutshell books are brown. But then CGI Programming with Perl and Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software are both green even though they both use Perl (Programming with GNU Software is purple). Furthermore there is a mixture of grey, purple, and dark blue books, where the relationship isn't quite as obvious as in the cases above.

Is there some kind of colouring scheme for the O'Reilly books, and if yes: What is it, and how are the colours selected for the books?

Claus

Hi Claus,

Many years ago, when we published the first Animal books, we decided to categorize the books by topic (Programming, System Administration, Unix Text Handling, etc.). To differentiate between the topics, we used different colors---Programming was rich magenta, System Administration was dark blue, and Unix Text Handling was kelly green.

As the Animal series has grown, we've developed a very full palette. Whenever we get into a new area, we have a discussion about whether we should launch a new subseries color or fit the new books into an existing color group. Programming Perl, for example, started life as a magenta programming book. Over time, as we developed more titles on Perl, we decided to give the topic of Perl its own color, a dark turquoise blue.

As we've covered more and more topics, it's been harder and harder to find colors that are clearly distinguishable from one another. And, to complicate matters for us, we use a different palette for French and German titles. We sell our English language books in France and Germany, and without a different color palette, it would be hard for a customer to tell which version of sed & awk Pocket Reference they've picked up, English or German. (You can't tell from the title, as it's the same in both languages.)

So we use color to help people tell our books apart and to organize them more easily into topic groupings. To help people better understand the relationships between our product groupings, we created a Route Map that shows our main color groupings and the titles associated with each topic.

Edie Freedman
Creative Director

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