In the creation of any kind of website (i.e. blogs, forums…) one of the most important aspects that you need to consider when you are going to design it is related to the interface between the final user and your website. That interface could be more or less amiable depending of the color scheme or palette that you have.
I know that is not possible to everyone to design its own website, so many times the people let their designer to make that choice. If that is the case, you suppose that your designer know about the website colors’ theory, or not? In this post I will give you the necessary tips to help you with the choice of a color pallete for your website.
Color Meanings
Do you know that colors have different meanings? Yes! Depending of the color your website will look adapted according to its niche. But what the colors mean? Let’s check it out:
Red: This color symbolizes energy, action, strength, leadership, courage. This color stimulates people to make quick decisions, is inherently exciting and the more color red the more the level of energy perceived. It draws attention and it is specially used on Marketing to focus the people attention on a particular element. That’s the reason why many people use this colors on landing pages.
Pink: This color symbolizes love, friendship, beauty. This color is a mix of a kind of red and a passive blue, that’s the reason why it represents passiveness, calming the mind and nerves. Also, it denotes feminine qualities, which make it one of the preferred colors of adolescent girls.
Brown: This color symbolizes stability, simplicity, health, reliability. It is the color of earth and people associate it with nature.
Orange: This color symbolizes happiness, creativity, determination, stimulation. It is quite similar to red and many people use to misinterpret it, but think well about it. This color shares some properties with the red, but if you want to attract the people attention you should definitively use red.
Gold: This one symbolizes wisdom and wealth. This is the color of riches, and you could use it if you want to create feelings of success, good health, relaxation or personal power.
Yellow: Yellow represents optimism, enlightenment and happiness, stimulating metal and physical activity. Like red, this one is also good to attract attention, so this is why you can find landing pages with yellow and red squares.
Green: Green symbolizes life, growth, health, fertility, endurance. Like brown, this color is associated to nature.
Blue: This color represents peace, youth, spirituality, trust. This is the most favorite color among people due to it is the color of sky and the ocean, being perceived as a constant in our lives. It is perfect to inspire calming, cooling, depth and stability.
Gray: This is a monotonic color which represents security, formality, maturity. It is great because it can be mix with any color, but it should be mix with a vivid color if you don’t want to inspire sadness or depression.
Black: This color can be interpreted by many things, but basically it represents seriousness, conventionalism, Mystery. Black is authoritative and powerful but you should mix it with light colors if you don’t want to inspire death, emptyness, fear or evil.
Well those are the most basic color meanings, of course I’m not a proffesional on the topic but however you can guide yourself with this article. So once you know the color that you are going to implement on your site, what do you need to do next? How do you know which colors are mixable with it? Well, check out the following resources & tools that I collected for you:
- The Color Wizard 3.0 : The Color Wizard is a color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors. It generates a pallete of colors which look good among them.
- ColorToy 2.0: This is is a Flash based color scheme generator and picker. It generates complementary color schemes based on your inputted color values or randomly, which is much more fun.
- COLOURlovers: COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. It gives the people who use color – whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification – a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.
With the information provided here and with the help of the resources mentioned above, you should be able to choose the colors that combine with your site personality/niche.
Hey! my name is Javier but you can call me Javo, everybody does.