Make Smarter: Color Choice, Pseudo Elements, Graphics Tutorials, The Great Divergence

First up in this month’s Make Smarter is a quick video describing HSL color values and how to use them to pick complementary colors. It centers around PowerPoint, but the color tips are spot on (and he did toss in a map).

A couple more quick color rules of thumb:

Be careful with high saturation values unless you're trying to burn out retinas.
Just go to Colour Lovers and pick a palette.

I owe Chris Coyers at CSS Tricks a great many beers. As I've said before, without him my web pages would look like MySpace threw up. Here he gives a great talk on Pseudo Elements.

For budding graphic artists and designers, check out this compendium of 45 free lessons in graphic design theory. Then go try these 45 Blender Tutorials.

Finally, because I haven’t put enough videos in here, check out this great talk by Niall Ferguson on The 6 killer apps of prosperity. It has nothing to do with anything, but it’s one of those things you’ll be glad you watched (minus using the term open source in a particularly head-slapping way).