The Best Way To Determine The Colors For Your Website
When it comes to any website, you need to give the customers a terrific color experience to get them hooked on your brand.
Imagine you launch the perfect website color scheme for your business. Everything is flawless—the layout, the performance, the navigation, the copy. It creates the dream experience for the users, and people gush over it.
Well, anyone can make this happen if you pick the right website color scheme, and we are going to chalk out for you just how to do this—even if you have no background in design.
Color palette plays an integral role in how we perceive the world. Consequently, it can radically affect how we perceive a website. But color scheme often takes a backseat regarding website color scheme and design. In this blog, we are about to tell you some of the must-know tips you can benefit from creating a stunning website color scheme:
- Get to know Color palette psychology basics
- Acquaint yourself with color theory
- Think about mixing color combinations
- Keep it simple
- Contrast your Color palette
- Integrate your branding
Whether you know color theory or need clarification on the difference between basic and secondary colors, the tips will help you select the ideal Color palette scheme when building your website. Let’s get started!
Get to know website color schemes tricks basics.
The role of color in marketing is an important one. Unfortunately, going over all the details would take too long.
Color palette associations are powerful. We develop them as infants; they usually stay with us for life. These associations are automatic and often subconscious.
Many of these associations are universal. For example, everyone learns to associate green with leaves and nature and yellow with the sun.
However, some are cultural. For example, one study found that Canadians associate envy with red, black, and green, while Poles thought black, purple, and orange were the envious ones.
These cultural associations are getting more important today than ever since many brands maintain a global presence. Depending on your colors, people from certain countries might associate something negative with your brand, which you don’t want.
Acquaint yourself with Color palette theory.
In a nutshell, color theory is the psychology of how color works. The longer version isn’t as easy to explain—it has entire college courses! But there are tons of basic things that anyone can use to enrich your understanding of color for your website color scheme and design.
First, one needs to get a grip on primary, secondary, and tertiary colors.
Primary colors cannot be made by combining any other two colors. There are three basic colors: blue, red, and yellow.
Secondary colors are the result of combining two primary ones. For instance, when you combine yellow and blue (two primary colors), you make the color green (a secondary color).
Tertiary colors are made by combining the primary and other ones next to each other on the color wheel. These create compound colors; for example, mixing blue (primary) and violet (secondary) creates blue-violet (tertiary).
Second, let’s talk about the warm and cool Color palette.
You probably already know what warm and cool Color palettes are. Reds, yellows, and oranges are classified as warm; on the other hand, violets, blues, and greens are not warm.
Third, it is important to figure out color nuances.
Not all colors you see is a pure one. Many of the ones you see online have been touched in one way or any other way.
You might be looking at a tint (a color with white mixed into it), a shade (a color with black mixed into it), or a tone (a color with grey entered into it).
Or you might be seeing a well-saturated or unsaturated color. The saturation of any kind of color is how shiny or dull the said color is.
There is a lot more regarding these color nuances, but these are the basic things you must know to choose effective color combinations, which we’ll discuss next.
Think about combining Website Color Schemes
Your goal is to pick any color scheme for the website color scheme and design. What does this mean, though? Well, you are looking for a good combination of colors. Your color scheme might involve multiple Color palette combinations depending on how many colors you work with.
Understanding these color nuances is critical when thinking about color combinations for your website. You need to know the reason certain colors work well and how you can modify colors to suit your scheme better.
Color theory is awesome at telling us what colors work well together. When selecting the colors for your palette, a few more advanced aspects of color theory can help you decide which Color palette will be best for you.
I mentioned how Color palettes are combined to make new colors, but one also needs to look at how to combine lots of colors.
Main color combinations
There are some main color combinations to try out. These include complementary, split complementary, triads and tetradic, analogous, and also, last but not least, monochromatic.
- Complementary colors sit opposite from each other on the color spectrum. A complementary color combination will be composed of one warm and cool color. Red and green are one popular complementary couple.
- Split complementary colors are comprised of a basic color and some colors that are adjacent to the complement of the base color.
- Triads and tetradic colors have similar relationships. Triads use evenly spaced colors on the color wheel (like red, blue, and yellow). Tetradic colors are four colors comprised of two complementary colors (orange, red, green, and blue).
- Analogous colors sit next to one other on the color wheel. As a result, analogous colors are remarkably similar, like green and yellow-green.
- Finally, monochromatic colors are just variations of the given color. This is accomplished by making use of tints, shades, and tones.
Think of these Color palette combinations as anyone’s tools. Since these combinations are all awesome, you won’t have to worry that the colors do not match.
Now that we all know the right combinations one can use, you can think about how to utilize those together to create a powerful, engaging color scheme.
Keep it simple
This may get complicated, but it should not be such. Rather, when choosing your color scheme, think about simplicity. A complicated, busy color scheme often must be clarified for the eye.
Keeping things simple has two big benefits.
The biggest upside is that simplicity can effortlessly tie together a color scheme. Everything will look unified if you have just a few colors at work. (Well, at least if you’ve used one of the Color palette combinations mentioned above.)
Another benefit is that viewers don’t have to work hard to process what’s happening. That’s one of the features of an awesome website. If you go bonkers on the color, your users will be more confused.
WordStream’s Color palette scheme is a great example. The homepage uses just three colors: blue, orange, and a splash of green.
Blue and orange are the main colors here, with the page ends up dominated by all kinds of shades of blue. The orange is there for the call to action, and since orange is blue’s complement, the button stands out and draws the eye.
Returning to the color language we reviewed earlier, we can classify this as a monochromatic combination combined with a complementary combination.
Contrast your Website Color Schemes
Next, think about contrast or Website Color Schemes. It is one of the more crucial things of good design when making your website color scheme.
The reason is the fact that when we use contrast, it makes an impact. Specifically, contrast can divert attention to some parts of the page.
Complementary colors do well together so well because they contrast each other. Furthermore, a surprising amount of research on CTA color choice proves that buttons that stand out convert better.
So if you have things that we want your users to take note of, make it contrast from the different areas of the page (or, at a minimum, from the design elements that are closest to it).
Integrate your branding
Finally, consider how your branding will play into your color scheme. For example, your brand already has certain colors associated with it. If so, you can use the existing color palette to help the business make your website color scheme.
However, you can need to tweak your brand colors. For example, if one of the colors you’ve chosen has a negative meaning, you may choose a different color.
That’s the key here—think about people’s color associations with your chosen Color palette. Are these associations in accordance with the values that you’ve built your brand on?
