How to choose colors for your website? It is said and proved that color plays a major role in enhancing or diminishing something. What is one of the most essential aspects of perceiving the world? It is definitely a color. Colors define a certain thing, product, place, website, etc. It could be anything. We create a vision and judgement of a thing only by looking after its color. So be careful while selecting the colors for your website as it isn’t only a matter of aesthetics and hire web development company with good designers. Colors can create associations, convey meanings, and just set the overall mode. That’s why when it comes to the usage of colors on the web, choose the best colors for website background as the power colors can have on the success of your website shouldn’t be underestimated.
The Color of your website really matters. According to various sources, it is claimed that the right color or color combination enhances brand recognition by almost 80%. This ultimately improves and boosts confidence in your brand, which is especially important if you are planning to build stores online. Through the right selection of colors, you can add a unique charm to your website while simultaneously improving user experience, appealing to their senses.
One of the first steps you will have to take in order to kickstart the process of designing your website is choosing/making a color palette. If you’re working for an existing brand, then probably your color scope will be limited, especially if this company has a brand guideline. However, if so far you only have a black and white sketch of a brand, waiting for definitions such as color, then keep reading ahead.
Now, in order to help you and make the setting up and designing of the website a little less complicated, we’ve put together a guide dedicated to color usage on the web. We’ll take a look at color psychology, color theory, types of colors, and color palettes.
1. Color psychology/Palette
Your aim is to get the website you are dealing with to evoke these attributes. For that, a very strong tool is color psychology. A brand/website’s color isn’t defined just because you or someone you know likes it. Whichever color you use will have a huge impact on your audience.
Let us just say that your audience matters and that you should design specifically for it.
As you know, color affects people and evokes certain ideas/attributes. The way we relate ideas to colors depends on our culture. Different cultures have different color interpretations. There is material to be found on color psychology for many countries/areas of the world.
Some of the color palette interpretations are as follows:-
(i)Red: Love, danger, anger, war. A darker red could be related to elegance.
(ii)Purple: Royalty, luxury, creativity, spirituality.
(iii)Yellow: Warning, happiness, cowardice, or wealth, in a golden shade.
(iv)Pink: Femininity, romance, sensitivity. Could also convey energy and innovation.
(v)Orange: Energy, vitality, autumn.
(vi)Blue: Sadness, calm, reliability, trust, corporate.
(vii)Black: Elegance, power, strength.
(viii)White: Purity, cleanliness, elegance.
(ix)Green: Nature, luck, cleanliness
(x)Grey: Conservative, modernity, luxury.
2. Color Theory
First of all, what is a color theory? Color theory is a set of fundamental principles that govern how to create harmonious color combinations, as well as logical structures between colors.
The color wheel
The best way to understand and learn the fundamentals of color theory is through learning about the color wheel. Now, even if you are not from the relevant field, as kids you might have seen the color wheel in your drawing books or creative books.
The color wheel was created during the 17th century by Sir Isaac Newton. It is the color spectrum mapped into a circle and color hues around a circle, which shows the relationships between primary colors, secondary colors and tertiary colors.
To make the process of choosing the right color for your website, let us have a look at primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, as well as tints, shades, and tones.
Primary colors
There are three primary colors in the color wheel: red, yellow, and blue. You can then combine the primary colors together to form secondary colors.
Secondary colors
There are three secondary colors on a color wheel which are purple (red + blue), green (blue + yellow), and orange (red + yellow). By combining secondary colors with primary colors, we get the tertiary colors that is;-.
Tertiary colors
As mentioned, the tertiary colors on the color wheel are a result of combining the primary and secondary colors (i.e. yellow-orange, blue-green, and more.)
Tints, shades, and tones
Primary, secondary, and tertiary colors are considered as pure colors, known also as hues. They stand out as bright, vivid, and cheerful. And they also are the base of tints, shades, and tones.
2. Using a Color Palette
What is the right way to use color palettes while designing your website?
There are numerous tools that you will find online which can be used to aid the process of creating color palettes on your website.
For example;- Adobe Color. It is one of the most popular and versatile tools. One can even use it to play and experiment around with the already known color combinations. And if you are in need of a little bit of inspiration, you can use the Explore option to browse through thousands of available palettes.
When you are creating a color palette for your website design, a good rule is to start with choosing three colors: a primary color, a secondary color, and an accent color. Once you find the appropriate color combination, apply it to your website design using the 60/30/10 rule. What is the 60/30/10 rule?
- 60% of the time the primary color is used.
- The second is used 30%.
- The accent color 10% of the time.