BlogByLuigiJuly 16, 2011
Color deeply influences the overall look and feel of a website and can form the first impression about a company for visitors. Color is one of the top three most important factors in a purchasing decision, according to an article by the Touro College Journal.
Cooper Marketing Group conducts an annual nationwide “color preference study”designed to find out what colors are currently in with various demographic groups. The results are sold to manufacturers and play a large part of the color trends in clothing, housewares, and automobiles each year. What does this mean for website design? Quite simply, sites with the wrong color scheme don’t appeal to their target audience and fail to convert.
[m2leep]
What do consider when developing a color palette
Companies and clients will often have a set of colors used in the corporate logo that they want implemented in the site design. It’s the web designer’s job to educate the client about how those colors will fit into the site’s style and gently encourage changes if necessary.
Colors have different meanings in different cultures and countries, so understanding the meaning of color in your target market is important. Here are some general guidelines for color codes:
- Blue is associated with stability, trust, and confidence. It is an excellent color for credit card website or other sites needing to inspire confidence.
- Black represents elegance, wealth, sophistication, and mystery.
- White symbolizes peace, purity, and simplicity.
- Orange represents warmth, enthusiasm, or warning.
- Red is associated with strength, power, love, and desire.
- Green can represent nature, health, vigor, and community.
- Yellow is often associated with brightness, happiness, idealism, and hope.
Text colors
Text is harder to read on a monitor than on paper so the choice of background and font colors is supremely important. Readability of text is the primary concern. If the text is light colored, then the background must be dark and vice versa. White and black are the most common combination and red and blue are useful for link and highlighted text. Contrast is important for making text readable, so avoid dark backgrounds with text of too similar a tone.
Browser-safe colors
A common problem when attempting to build a web design around an established set of logo colors is that Pantone colors do not always reproduce accurately in browsers. When a non-browser safe color appears in a website, browsers will adapt by shifting the color. Some computers with aging graphics hardware may also fail to display colors correctly.
The best way to avoid this issue is to stick to the “browser-safe palette” of 256 or 216 colors (for really conservative designers). These colors are designed to be accurately displayed in all browser and hardware environments. While some designers (and clients) may find this limiting, it is the only way to ensure that a site is always viewed at its best. By limiting colors this way, designers can ensure that file sizes are smaller and that the site will load quickly.
Color psychology
Designers of all stripes know that colors can be organized into groups based on the feel they give a viewer. They fall into three basic categories, and sites incorporating colors from each group can have a more balanced feel.
Cool colors:
Cool colors have a calming effect. A site dominated by cool colors can appear impersonal and cold, but used in combination with warm or neutral colors, they can be comforting.
- Blue
- Green
- White
- Turquoise
- Silver
- Gray
Warm colors:
Warm colors rev us up and get people excited about what they’re seeing. Warm colors convey emotions ranging from optimism to violence. However, too much can be jarring and overwhelming to visitors.
- Red
- Yellow
- Pink
- Orange
- Gold
- Brown
- Black
Neutral colors:
Neutral colors make good backgrounds and font colors and can serve to unify mixed color palettes. They can also help focus attention on the central colors or tone down color combinations that might otherwise be overwhelming.
- Black
- White
- Gray
- Ivory
- Brown
- Beige
Conclusion
Color is a powerful tool in the web designer’s toolbox. It can be the first thing a site visitor notices and can be the difference between a hit and run visit and a new customer. The same two sites done with different color palettes can give substantially different experiences to site visitors. Consider color carefully in the beginning of the design process so that various options can be presented and discussed with clients.
We hope we’ve given you a few reasons to give more thought to color choices in your web designs.
Daniela Baker is a social media advocate with the small business credit cards website, CreditDonkey. If you’ve got interesting stories around color choices or advice for our readers, we’d love to hear it in the comments.
Amazing Web Based Color Tools to Help You With Any Project
Post Tags: #Color Selectors#html color selector#Web Design#Web Development Tools#Website Design
Similar Posts
BlogByLuigiOctober 8, 2009
Put away your tourism handbook, because today we’ll be taking a guided tour through the colors of United States landmarks. Wondering what this post is all about? Every couple weeks or so, we scavenge Flickr for some wonderfully inspiring photography to build color schemes from. The results can be used to start graphic and web…
Read More Color Scheme Inspiration – USA National LandmarksContinue
BlogBytdomf_80aa6July 12, 2010
This world cup has been great especially from a photographer perspective some great pictures have been captured in this world cup.
Read More Beautiful Photography Pictures Captured In World Cup 2010Continue
BlogBytdomf_80aa6April 21, 2010
A huge list of Free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Web Tools and Softwares for SEO Specialist and Web developers.
Read More 130+ Free SEO Web Tools and Search Engine Optimization SoftwareContinue
BlogBytdomf_80aa6October 9, 2009
10 awesome German Design Blogs
Read More 10 awesome German Design BlogsContinue
BlogBytdomf_80aa6February 1, 2010
Most young mammals have been observed to play with whatever they can find, turning such things as pinecones, rocks, and food into toys. Toys and games have been unearthed from the sites of ancient civilizations. They have been written about in some of our oldest literature. Toys excavated from the Indus valley civilization (3000-1500 BCE)…
Read More 50+ Beautiful Colorful and Funny Toy Design CollectionContinue
BlogBytdomf_80aa6October 17, 2009
Learn a simple Photoshop trick you can use to make nondestructive adjustments and preserve image quality when you work with photos for a website layout.
Read More Simple Photoshop trick for nondestructive image adjustmentsContinue
- netshellsays:July 17, 2011 at 5:21 AMHello,This is a good blog it’s provide the good design like as logo design and templates design and flash design.
- Nathan Marcarellisays:July 17, 2011 at 5:47 PMThis lists some great resources for web design and logo design. I have seen too many designs go to waste when improper colors have been used due to colors not matching or simple color clashes.
- Samanthasays:July 18, 2011 at 1:35 AMthanks for the really awesome links! Will be making use of those for sure! Keep the great articles coming 🙂
- web design harrowsays:July 18, 2011 at 5:38 AMi have read many posts related to importance of colors in web design,,,but this post is very useful for beginners in web development,,,keep writing such posts
- wsdsays:July 18, 2011 at 2:10 PMA different color is great, When I discovered the “Aqua” I just couldnt stop using it.Now I really love shades and different colors of blue, I think its the best.
- Creative Girlsays:July 18, 2011 at 3:53 PMThese ideas have been really helpful! Now I know which color schemes will create the best reactions from website visitors!
- Website design wiltshiresays:July 19, 2011 at 9:56 PMI find Kuler’s community aspect brilliant!
- Website Developmentsays:July 20, 2011 at 6:50 AMYes, you are write colors are most important part of our website.
- duncan gatawasays:August 3, 2011 at 5:37 AMI had a case once designing a travel site.The owner wanted to keep the background black.And while i made an effort to make it attractive,the black took away the brightness from the site.I usually find that lighter backgrounds usually make a site pop
- Michelonasays:December 26, 2012 at 4:45 PMFantastic site….an all in one to help people make the most eye catching websites. Thank you
- hotmail searchsays:April 16, 2013 at 8:39 PMHi! I’ve been following your blog for a while now and finally got the courage to go ahead and give you a shout out from Austin Texas! Just wanted to say keep up the excellent job!
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
