Color Usage Site
The Color Usage Site website (http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov) provides a guide to color design for information visualization. The site is intended to help designers who are not color experts find usable color designs.

It includes
- a step by step process for designing color usage in complicated interface graphics
- a detailed example of design of an aerospace display
- a new color selection tool to support the recommended design process
- information about color usage standards and guidelines
- information about applied color science, and
- reference resources.

Quality Assurance
The Color Usage Website is part of a larger project investigating potential new methods for assuring quality design of interfaces for safety-critical applications. A number of factors limit the effectiveness of current guidelines and standards. Standards specifying values for individual interface elements are often too inflexible to accommodate the current rapid pace of design changes. Managers sometimes fail to appreciate the usability issues at stake.

Future replacements for today's guidelines and standards may use current information technologies to provide more detailed examples and more supporting tutorial material than can be accommodated in current versions.