How to Choose Colors for Your Website
Rules to Choose Colors
Before you start choosing colors for your website, you need to know a few simple rules.
- Be consistent. If you already have a logo and brand colors, plan to use those for your site. If you think your current colors will not be a good fit for your new site, then you will want to make your color changes across the board.
- Consider your target audience. Many studies provide insight into the best colors to use depending up upon your audience. Blue is good for both men and women. Men prefer blue, green, and black. Women like blue, purple, and green, and they do not like orange and brown.
- Consider your product. Health products are usually some shade of green. A bright red color for a spa site would not be very appealing. Visit this site to see colors for many brands and consider what thoughts and emotions are triggered.
The Logo Company has come up with an amazing breakdown which colors are best for which companies and why. Click on the infographic to take a closer look at these details.
Use a bright and contrasting color for call-to-action buttons. The best choice for your CTA buttons are red, green, yellow and orange. Dark colors, such as black, dark grey or brown have very low conversion rate. Your CTA buttons should stand out on a page.
Simple Palette
When you choose colors, I recommend that you limit your color scheme to one primary color and one or two accent colors. A simple palette will allow your visitors to focus on your content. You can approach that palette in three ways.
You could pick two contrasting colors that are opposite to each other on the color wheel. This gives you both a warm and cool color on your site.
You can choose three colors from the same base color, each one lighter than the next. This is called tone-on-tone and is a very good choice for sites where the graphics or pictures are the primary content. A great tool for choosing a set of tone-on-tone colors is Color-Hex. Choose a starting color and then scroll down the page to the section showing lighter and darker shades of that color.
Finally, you can select three colors that are equally spaced around the color wheel. This is a powerful combination and very popular in site design, especially for sites that want to express a sense of authority.
The Color Wheel Tool from Adobe Color CC allows you to experiment with many combinations.
Resources:
One of my favorite tools to use when I discover a website with a great color combination is StylifyMe. This site allows you add the URL of any site and learn both the color codes and font names used for the site.
To discover the colors in an image or photograph, use the Colors from Image tool at this site. Import any image and use your cursor to learn the color codes.
I could hang out on the Design-Seeds site for hours looking at the images and color combinations. If you need some inspiration, it is the site to visit.
What color resource is your favorite? Let me know in the comments.