Utilising colours when designing your website

Colours… they make a website appeal to customers, show off your brand or in general make it look nice. But you can’t just throw different colours onto your website and hope for the best result. Picking your colours is essential for creating a magnificent website for your clients.

One reason why you may pick your colours wisely is due to the industry. Linking colours and emotion can give your user an easy time when navigating through your website. For example, using the colour orange. The colour orange focuses on energy and friendliness, this is perfect if you want to engage those emotions with your audience.

As well as using orange for emotions, it also works well with other colours. A factor that needs to work when designing a website. The last thing you want is a messy, hard to use website that is going to confuse the user. For example, greens and purples work really well with each other.

Furthermore, back to the industry points, it is possible to identify which industry the business is in by viewing their website. For example, blue colours signify medical and health. The NHS use the colour blue, this is significant throughout their brand. Just like Coca-Cola with red. If you can utilise a colour within your website, you could offer them a fresh brand value which can be recognised throughout.

Every website has a colour scheme. Primary colours are used for the main areas, with secondary colours coming in for text colours etc. Repeating colours throughout your website can play with your user’s mind – a little extreme but you don’t want to lose a potential customer through a lack of colour judgement. There are 3 successful ways to mix the colours together in an effective manner.

Triadic

One of the more basic and balanced of the structures in the triadic. Complementing the colours but straying from the trickier contrast, this structure is safe and reliable. Something that custom builds wouldn’t use. On a 12-step colour wheel, select three colours that are located 120 degrees from each other, making a triangle.

Compound

This scheme is extremely rewarding if done well, however it can be difficult to pull off. Also known as split complimentary, this concept uses four colours, two contrasting pairs and two complementary pairs.

Analogous

This is the third and final structure. This one highlights the vibrancy of the colours chosen, you can use a red-orange-yellow colour scheme which will appear very energetic and lively. This is easy to pull off, however, if you choose your colours well it can be a game changer!

To conclude, it is important that before you begin putting pen to paper, or code to file, that you know exactly what colours are going to work. You may find that throughout your design you may switch colours up, that is fine.

If you manage to get the colours correct, then your client is going to be happy.

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