Color theory for websites

"COLORS SPEAK"

The first impression upon visiting any fresh website is purely based on colors employed in the site. Colors, apart from usability,  play a primary role in portraying the website’s personality. For instance, in a fresh website that has lighter shades of blue / along with other colors which complement blue, signifies “reliablity”.

In general, color blue represents peace, tranquility, calm, stability, harmony, unity, trust, truth, confidence, conservatism, security, cleanliness, order and  loyalty. Blue is considered a business color because it reflects reliability, best explanation to people wondering about blue in most of corporate logos and websites.

Examples of some corporate logos is blue -

Bank of America logoFord logoGE logo
Dell logoInfosys logoFidelity logo
sony logosamsung logonokia logo
volkswagon logowalmart

As you can gather from the above examples , blue is a 'global color', emotions attached to colors doesn’t have to be global always, certain colors represent different emotions in different parts of the world. Hence we designers should decide on colors for websites based on target audience / region.

Every color carry meaning, examples –

White - represents reverence, purity, simplicity, peace, humility, precision, innocence, snow, good.

White represents marriage in western countries but death in some of the eastern countries like India and Japan.

Red - is an extremely high energy color and drags highest attention. Hence in websites red can be used for small and important sections.

Red sybolizes extreme emotions like love, anger, valentine, danger, desire, violence.

Green – represents nature, environment, health and good luck.

Green is not considered good color in China.
Green is the color of Islam.
Color symbolizes Catholic in Ireland.
Some tropical countries associate green with danger.

Combination of colors in websites -

For websites, we need to be a little careful while combining different colors.
Never use primary colors (Red, Blue and Green) together as combination. Primary colors are high on energy, when used together they vibrate and could be harsh on eyes.

Example –

Primary colorsPrimary color

Styles for Content region -

For content, background and font / text color should always be colors of absolute contrast. Else, it is strain on reader’s eye and they might lose interest in the website.

Traditional method of using white background with black lettering is best option ever. White, low intensity cool color gives clean, clear and spacious look to the site and reading black lettering over white is no trouble unless the font size is small.

Example –

Uniformity in color scheme -
Consistency / uniformity also plays an important role. We should try and stay consistent on color schemes throughout the site as it provides uniformity to the site and continuity to visitor.

 

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HI, AM JAY, AND I IMAJINE
I am a freelance web designer and web application developer with over 7 years of result oriented experience. I am accustomed to working in a dynamic and goal oriented client environment. My strengths include the ability to visualize, personalize and create a truly unique and enthralling web presence. My passion apart from web design, logo design, Flash animation / actionscripting, CMS Customization, print and web development includes photography, game programming, tutorial development (includes Adobe Flash, Adobe Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop) and blogging.
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