Colour in Web Design and on the Web

There are many ways in which colour is used online, some good and some bad. When creating a web design, colour plays an important part in attracting a customer/reader. It is commonly know that within the first few seconds of viewing a website, a potential customer can either stay or choose to look somewhere else. Therefore, the aesthetics of your web design are vital.  In this post I will be covering:

• Reactions to colour in web design
• Colour schemes and themes
• web design colours

Reactions to Colour in web design

In school we were taught that different colours are associated with different emotions, red = love, black = evil, green = peace, and so on. The same principle applies on the web. Different tones of colours can help set the look of the website. Colour tones such as red, magenta, orange and yellow can create a warmth to your website. These tones can be quite harsh to view and therefore, should be used for smaller web design elements or one major area on a website. Blue, green and purple are calming colour tones. These colours can be used more frequently.

When creating your web design you need to consider how people will react to the colours used and if they represent your company message.  For example, blue colour tones are often used for spa companies. This is as a spa is a place where people go to relax, and blue creates calming impression. To give an impression of luxury, then a purple should be used, as it is still calming, using a high amount of blue in the RGB combination.

Colour Schemes and Themes

Finding out which colour you want to use gives you a basis for a colour scheme. There are many websites out there that can help you choose the best colours that compliment each other. I have found that Kuler works exceptionally well.

When using Kuler, you can choose a base colour to help you choose other colours. If we choose a purple base colour, Kuler gives us our cool tones and warm tones to compliment the purple.  One of the warn colours that is shown is gold. Gold is a great complimentary colour of purple as it gives the same impression of luxury.

Using Kuler can help you decide the right colours to use for you website and provides you with all the colour information you need including, the hexadecimal code. Remembering, that using too many colours can often turn people away.

web design Colours

There are web safe colours that are often said that these must be used on the web. This does limit the colour variations that you can use in you web design. The web safe colours are quite harsh on the eye and there very few colour tones.

Web Safe Colours

Web safe colours are used so that people using screens that only display 256 colours can also view you website and see what everyone else sees.  There is less then 1% of people that still use these computer screens. In this case, web safe colours no longer need to be used so strictly.

Now that you know all about the how colour is viewed and considered in web design and on the web, you can start creating your on web designs with this in mind. Don’t be shy of colour but remember that you want to create the right impression and keep people coming back to your website.