Blog: New Web Site Colors

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Regular users of my personal home page may have noticed that I changed the color scheme this week. Considering that the style sheet (which defines various aspects of the appearance) used on my personal site was more than ten years old, I had been contemplating a change for some time and decided to finally do it.

The old scheme (see the Internet Wayback Machine for a 2007 rendition) was actually based on the corporate colors of US Genomics, my employer at the time. As I served as the webmaster for the company in that era, I had a variety of software widgets and tools set up to work with compatible colors, so it was simply easier for me to use the same set of colors for my personal web page. At the time, Cascading Style Sheets were a relatively new method for establishing the basics of a page's appearance, and I actually used them on my personal site before they ever appeared on the company web site.

One of the ideas of the Cascading Style Sheet was that they made it quite easy to change the look of multiple web pages without having to modify any of the pages individually. Thus, it is remarkable that I didn't even bother to take advantage of that capability for more than a decade, which is certainly an eternity on the Internet.

When I first started thinking about changing the appearance of the page long ago, I was just going to change the background color to a nice shade of gray instead of green, change the logo at the top of the page, and keep the rest of the color scheme the same. However, for some time I have been looking for ways to incorporate the "monad" or "yin-yang" symbol into more of my work.

The "monad" is significant to me as it was used as the corporate symbol of the Northern Pacific Railway which employed my recently-deceased paternal grandfather for nearly four decades. However, its origins actually lay in 11th century China, where philosopher Chow Lien Ki used it to demonstrate the concept of yin and yang in balance. The traditional Chinese version included a dark dot in the light area and a light dot in the dark area, to show that not only were yin and yang parts of the same thing, but parts of one were in the other. The embodiment of this concept of balance, which I find to be almost completely lacking in modern North American society, has made the monad very attractive to me as a personal symbol. The Northern Pacific Railway Historical Society has put on the web a pamphlet published by the railway explaining more of the history and meaning, and the story of how it came to be used as a corporate logo.

When I sat down to change my web page, it was clear to me that I wanted the top graphic to incorporate the NP "monad" logo. The easiest way to make that work was to adopt the diesel locomotive paint scheme used for freight service by the Northern Pacific, which was mostly black with yellow stripes and white and red highlights. That is the color scheme that appears today on my web page.

The actual monad appearing on my home page right now is derived from a picture of the Northern Pacific logo taken at the Northern Pacific Museum in Toppenish, Washington. In the future, I may switch to a more stylized version incorporating the center dots--but the red and black colors used by the Northern Pacific will remain in any event. It's my way to call for understanding of the concept of yin and yang in today's society, and to honor the memory of my grandfather.