The one thing worth knowing before you buy kitchen towels is that absorbency and looks are almost always in tension, so pick the job first. A towel for drying hands by the sink can be thinner and prettier. A towel for pulling a hot pan off the stove or mopping up a milk spill needs weight and a tight weave, and the pretty ones rarely have either.
For color, I've learned to stop fighting it. Anything white looks great in the store and turns the shade of a dish rag within two weeks of real cooking, tomato sauce especially, so unless you're bleaching weekly, go with a mid tone: olive, rust, a faded denim blue, something that can take a hit and not show it. Stripes and checks hide stains better than solids, which is the opposite of what the folded display tells you. Where I think towels go wrong is when they're bought to match the backsplash. A kitchen towel's whole life is being grabbed wet, slung over an oven handle, and bunched up by the sink, so matching it to your tile is a bit like color coordinating your gym socks. It just doesn't hold up to the job, and six months in you won't remember which shade you were matching anyway.
As for where they don't belong, I wouldn't put a thin, decorative waffle weave towel anywhere near actual cooking duty. They're fine for hands, useless for grease, and they'll shred before the grease comes out in the wash regardless.
The difference between a towel that lasts and one that's dead in a month usually comes down to the edge and the fiber. Run your thumb along the hem in the shop, if you can feel loose threads or a seam that's barely folded over, it'll fray the first time it goes through a hot wash. Cotton with some linen mixed in dries faster and holds up better over years than pure cotton terry, which gets heavy and a little sour smelling if it doesn't dry fully between uses. Flour sack towels, the thin, flat woven ones, are underrated for glass and cast iron because they don't leave lint, even though they look like they'd fall apart in a stiff breeze. They don't. I've had the same half dozen for years, and they still do the job better than towels twice their price with a nicer print.
So before I buy, I ask myself: is this towel going to spend its life looking nice on a hook, or actually drying dishes, because it won't be doing both well?
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