When it comes to designing your site, choosing the right colour palette is one of the most important design decisions you’ll make. Colour increases brand recognition by 80{21dc2fe1b43c4cf57a2e25a56b286f09fbb32a45ddf34dcf04be366972dd7b06}, which means picking your web design colour palette is essential to making your website enjoyable, engaging and memorable to your audience.
What is a website colour palette?
A website colour palette is the combination of colours you choose for your site’s design. You’ll use these colours throughout your whole site.
Colour palettes are used to ensure that your website colours are coordinated. It’s a way to organize colours that look good together and well throughout your site based on the message you’re trying to convey, the emotions you want to be associated with your brand, and the action you want direct customers to take on your site.
Why is a colour palette important for my website?
You want your site to look good and a colour palette is half of the equation. However, choosing the right colour palette is about more than just an attractive site. Colour influences our perceptions, making it a powerful tool in design.
Colour has emotional and psychological effects on viewers. Different colours evoke different emotions, which means using colour theory to design your website helps you communicate a message.
For example, blue typically evokes a sense that something is trustworthy and dependable. Many financial institutions want to seem trustworthy and they use variations of the colour in their branding. Red is said to evoke hunger, and the majority of fast-food chains around the world use red as their primary colour.
Colour also affects our overall perception of a brand by influencing the website’s design. If the colours clash, the design looks bad, and visitors get a bad impression of your site and business.
A poor colour scheme and inconsistent use of fonts can make people feel that a brand is untrustworthy, disorganised, and unprofessional. When you are buying a product or service directly on a site, you probably don’t want to use a site that looks unprofessional. Proper site design attracts traffic and lends a sense of credibility.
Understanding the Basics of Colour
Before you can choose your web design colour palette, you need to understand the underlying importance of colours and how they interact together, or Colour Theory.
At its most basic level, colour theory refers to the interaction of colours in a design through contrast, complementation, and vibrancy.
Contrast, Complementation, Vibrancy
Contrast
Contrast is how you divide elements on your website. Think about it in terms of black and white – these colours create contrast; they completely juxtapose each other. If you have a black background with white text, your eye is drawn directly to the text. Contrast also helps readability by ensuring you can actually see what’s on the page.
Complementation
Complementation is how colours look beside other colours. Complementary colours are opposites on the colour wheel and provide balance for the eye. Complementation can help you choose colours which look good together.
Vibrancy
Vibrancy is the mood a colour sets. Bright/warm colours are considered more energising (reds and yellows), while cool colours make us feel calmer (blue and green).
These interactions between colours and facets of colours are what makeup colour schemes. A scheme can be used as a blueprint for choosing what colours go together. They are created by working within colour families in the colour wheel and combine elements of colour theory. Your colour scheme is what you use to choose your colour palette.
Four Common Colour Schemes
There are four common colour schemes that serve as the basis of most colour palettes.
Monochrome
A monochrome colour scheme is based on only one base colour and includes different shades and hues of that same colour.
Complementary
A complementary colour scheme uses two colours from opposite sides of the colour wheel (complementary colours). It can use various shades of these colours, but they are within the original complementary colours.
Analogous
Analogous colour schemes use three colours that sit directly next to each other on the colour wheel, creating a cohesive look throughout the site but without looking too monotonous.
Triadic
Triadic colour schemes use three colours; those that sit triangular from one another on the colour wheel. To create this scheme, pick a base colour, then draw an equilateral triangle across the wheel to get the other two colours.
Creating Your Colour Palette
Now that you know how colour palettes are made and why they matter, it’s time to create your own web design colour palette in three simple steps.
1: Choose a Base colour
No matter which colour scheme you choose for your web design colour palette, you’ll need to start with a base colour. This could be a colour you’re already using, such as for your logo, or a colour that evokes an emotion you want to be associated with your brand, such as pink for vibrancy.
Pick a basic colour as a starting point then, using a tool like Paletton, you can find the perfect shade of your main colour, which will be your true base colour.
2: Choose a Colour Scheme
Once you have your base colour, it’s time to choose the colour scheme for your palette. While we discussed the traditional four above (monochromatic, complementary, analogous, and triadic), there are many other colour schemes to explore.
Try to focus on how you want your site to be perceived to avoid using too many colours or feeling overwhelmed. Do you want to evoke a feeling of security? An analogous colour scheme – using colours next to each other on the colour wheel – is said to create a sense of harmony.
Paletton will also give you an idea of how various colour schemes will work with your base colour and show you the exact shades that work within your chosen colour scheme, which makes up your colour palette. You don’t need to feel overwhelmed because there are tools that can answer the questions you have fast.
3. Implement Your Colour Palette
After choosing your colour scheme and using it to build your colour palette, you’re ready to apply it to your site.
Your colour palette isn’t just for your background and text, you also need to think about the other design elements on your site and how they tie into your colour palette, like images and photographs. Photography can make or break your colour scheme. Be sure that the images you choose fit in with your overall colour palette. Remember, you can manipulate photos by editing the colours and adding filters, so it is easy to rework that perfect image to fit with your overall design.
Final Say
Try not to be overwhelmed by choices. Remember that nothing is set in stone on your site. You may find that once you start using your palette, the hues aren’t quite right. You can always use online tools to tweak your palette until you get the style you’re looking for. The most important thing is consistency.
Be certain of the message you want to communicate and choose the colours that deliver more than just a message, but that convey an emotion that will secure sales.
Welcome to Our Blog
We want to share our expert knowledge with you, and that is why we want you to know that all of our blogs are written by our in-house writing team.
Our writers do the research, discuss the topics and form their own opinions. They do not write for a commission from any sites, products or services mentioned, and we do not publish advertorials or paid reviews.
We enjoy writing for you and will continue to be transparent about our blogs, which are only opinion pieces.
