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Have you ever eaten some multi-colored cereal, and looked at the milk afterward to see it’s an awful brown-grey-purple color? Well, that’s just the thing about color theory. If you’re shoving tons of different colors together without much thought, it’s going to end up as one big muddled mess of color and confusion. It might not end up a brown-grey-purple bowl of liquid, but a mess nonetheless.
Color theory is essential to an effective design, whether it be print or web. There are a lot of different color combinations out there, more than you can even fathom, but it takes a sharp eye and the right knowledge to find the best ones for a design.
Sharing Your Color Feelings
Colors can convey different feelings, and are utilized in our every day life to institute those emotions or responses. For instance, a stop sign is red, which stands out, and displays urgency. You don’t want people to think about stopping, you want them to stop. Reds typically convey very strong emotions, and are used as accent colors instead of one main color. You see the stop sign because there aren’t too many other red objects around. A red button stands out because it is intense and again stands out. Red is one of those colors you’ll probably want to use sparingly, and not as the prominent color on a website.
Here is a quick rundown of some feelings from certain types of colors:
- Red: Strong emotions, raises blood pressure, exciting, not calming.
- Yellow: Joyful, happy, energetic. Can also be used for caution and security.
- Green: Soothing, restful, relaxing. Can also represent money.
- Blue: Health, healing, knowledge, cleanliness.
- Purple: Royalty, nobility, stability, mystery and magic.
- White: Perfection, innocence, cleanliness, purity.
- Black: Power, formality, death, evil.
Different combinations of these colors, and in different intensities cause a array of emotional responses. A pale green might be relaxing and easy on the eyes, but if you add yellow into green, you get a bright lime color, which inspires a lot of energy. It all depends on how you represent each color. If you play around with them enough you’ll achieve exactly the emotion you are looking for.
Target Audience and Colors
There is a time and place for everything, even lots of colors all at once.
It is important to know your target audience when choosing colors. Without an idea of who you are making the website for, you’re really just shooting in the dark. This is of course essential knowledge.
Let’s say our website is for kids. What kind of kids? Well, our website is going to be selling toys, mostly with cartoon character themes. Colors for this site will be a lot brighter, full of energy and excitement. Kids will probably be browsing this site, so adding in some characters with bright colors might be helpful too. You would probably want to stay away from a black background, whereas white will help emphasize the innocence of the site. Yellow, red, blue and green, purple, in higher intensities are all excellent colors. The site will also be more image-heavy and far less text-heavy. Kids associate with recognizable shapes and characters more than with words.
Here’s another scenario…
Our website will be for kids, only this time adults will be browsing it, not kids. Let’s say it’s a children’s hospital. Where the product of the website is for kids, it likely won’t be of any interest for children to go browse (unless maybe you have a learning section designed for them, in which case you’d refer to the previous paragraph). On a hospital’s website, you’ll want more soothing colors, probably in pastels. Greens, and blues are used by hospitals to keep patients calm, and are appropriate to use on a website of the same subject, to keep parents calm. White will be a main color on this site as well, with smooth clean lines. You can have more text-heavy sections and fewer image-heavy sections, though you’ll probably have periodic photos of children and families to help get the message across.
So, you can see from these two instances, there are several different ways to go about choosing colors.
Can’t Decide on a Color Combination
If you’re having trouble coming up with an appealing color combination, then there are a couple resources out there that may be of some help to you.
Start off by first recognizing who your audience is, and the feelings you’d like people to have when they go to your site. Once you’ve decided on these, move onto selecting colors.
Colors on the Web brings us a couple handy resources:
- Color Wheel – The name probably makes you think about that horrid little painted circle you had to make in your beginning art class, but I assure you this is much easier. Just click the “Spin” button, and it’ll come up with some random color combinations for you. They’re not all high quality color combinations, but some are very nice. It gives you a preview of what it would look like on a page, and allows you to switch which color is where.
- Color Wizard 3.0 – This thing is fantastic. You adjust the color up at the top using the RGB sliders (or hit the Randomize button), and it gives you variations below! Hue, Saturation, Tint & Shade are all going to give you variations similar to the one you selected, and below those is a Suggested Color Scheme. You can see what the Monochromatic, Analogous, Triadic, Tetradic, Complimentary, and Split Complimentary color schemes would be. This has got quite a few features built into it.
With these tools and a few simple tips, you’ll develop a much higher quality website than through random color selection.
Colors may not seem like a difficult task when you first think about them, but there is a lot more work that goes into their choices than most people think. You may not choose to go this in depth when selecting your colors, but I strongly suggest you do. The most successful websites have every possibility researched before they go live. There is a lot more to color design than meets the eye.
Topics: Design
