Does your site feel boring, outdated, and passé… because you’re sick of its colors? Do you want to revamp it, but don’t know how to go about choosing new ones, or even whether to try?
It’s worth the effort. Your web site has ten seconds to make an impression. Color is a plays a critical role in that decisive moment. And color is not only how people get drawn into your site, it’s how they recognize and remember it to come back.
Color Provides the Visual Cues that Are Key to Having a Memorable Site
Do you need a designer’s help to get started picking a great color palette? No! Here’s a simple worksheet for choosing a complete color palette for your site.
1. What feeling(s) do you want your business to convey? Express this in a minimum of three, and a maximum of six, words.
2. Does your business currently use distinctive colors—in its logo, business card, storefront, etc.—that “must” be used in your web site? Add it, or them, to your potential palette now.
3. Think about warm colors (yellow-orange-red-brown) as opposed to cool colors (green -blue-indigo-violet-gray). For example, blue is a frequently used in business because it creates a sense of calm, trustworthiness, solidity and confidence. However, it is “cool” rather than warm. If one of your chosen adjectives was “warmth,” or if you have a “people” business, blue might be better used as an accent rather than a major component of your site.
Red, the quintessential “warm” color, conveys vitality, health and playfulness. But it also can imply a sense of urgency and alarm. Many colors are ambiguous in this way, with meanings and associations which vary from culture to culture. Keep in mind any strong color associations of your potential audience(s). An excellent short article by Rob Mills on how color communicates meaning is here.
4. Right now, choose a “draft” palette of 5 or 6 colors (a palette is a collection of 3 to eight colors that work well together). You can use swatches from the local paint store, colored pens, a scanned image which contains the colors you want, Photoshop—whatever you feel comfortable with. There are some very helpful online tools as well. I like Adobe’s Kuler, and Color Scheme Designer, both free. (And yes, this should be fun!)
5. Consider contrast. Bright, strong, and dark colors work well for headlines. Very light colors make lousy headlines, but can make wonderful backgrounds. You can lighten or darken some colors on your palette for the sake of contrast. Getting stuck? Browse sites you admire, and observe how they have used warm and cool, light and dark, bright and dull.
6. Check for readability. Is your color vision normal? Approximately 15% of the general population have some kind of distortion in the way they perceive color. There’s a good visual simulator of various kinds of color blindness here. Your site needs to be legible for these folks. Modify accordingly!
7. Will people be printing out your web pages? If so, use dark type on a light or white background for the printable versions.
8. Now, let’s get down to business. It’s time to finalize at least two strong colors which can predominate on the site. Designate another one or two that can be used as accent or background colors. It’s better to have too few than too many colors—designer Roger Black, for example, gained international fame for his distinctive magazine designs using just black, white, and red, period.
Once you’ve done the right-brain choosing, and the left-brain tweaking, you’ll have a color palette that you can use on any site or template. Still aren’t satisfied? Try one of the online palette-creation sites mentioned above. Or, look at photos (travel photos are especially good), paintings, or design books for more ideas. The book Living Colors: The Definitive Guide to Color Palettes Through the Ages
But above all, have fun. Color appeals to a primal part of us, and its meaning and impact can’t be fully explained. So savor the inexplicable. If you’re enjoying it, chances are your site visitors will too.
Have you experimented with color palettes, or found a really helpful color-picking tool? I’d love to hear from you.
