Colour Combinations and Web Design
If you are doing an art piece, the more colours you have, the better looking it is. However, when it comes to designing, web designs especially, more colours is not better. It is about balance and contrast. It is how the colours compliment the website as a whole theme and to have it fit right to the content. Many people still struggle in choosing the right colour. So, how do you actually pick the correct colour combination for a website?
Colours each have a meaning to it and the human eyes react differently to each of them. Red is a colour of danger. It signifies and alert signal to our brain that says, “STOP”. Hence most error messages are coloured in red. So do most text that webmasters want the users to notice. It also is the colour of passion. So, any websites dealing with romance or love is appropriate to have red as it’s base colour.
Contrasting the website with light and dark colours to differentiate parts and individual sections of the page is viable way of making effective use of colours. For example, you can have a darker background colour against a lighter foreground content section. This will bring the eye to notice the lighter section first, therefore guiding the user to the content of the page. How about bright colours such as orange and yellow? They can be used to bring emphasis towards promotional items.
It is not about what colours to use, but how to use the colours effectively. You can have a combination of red, black, gold and still have a beautifully created website. As I have said it before, balance it the key. In this example again, black can be used for the background with red as the foreground and gold as it’s text colour. Mixed carefully, and depending on the theme of your website, this is a good colour combination.
You might be thinking right now, which colour goes with which colour? You can either browse all over the net, looking at websites and noting down good combination of colours as you go or you can simply go to http://www.colormatch.dk. This website is extremely simple and easy to use, yet very powerful in terms of features. Simple and straightforward, you simply choose one dominant colour for your website and it'll simply choose for you 6 other colours which compliment your main colour, together with the colour codes. Simple as 1-2-3. Note that colormatch.dk only works in Internet Explorer browsers. Try googling for colormatch and get enhanced and modified versions of the original.
Lastly but not least, try to limit the number of colours to a reasonable amount. 2 to 4 are good amount of colours, including black and white. If you really need to use extra colours, try to use variation of the main colours hue. If your main colour is red, wine red, crimson or even maroon are good alternatives. Even certain tone of brown could actually look like red sometimes. Try to "recolour" your graphics or get some graphics which tally with your overall selection of colours.
Another good concept to follow is to apply a colour scheme according to your logo. If you logo has orange and black for example, try to enhance that colour by applying those same colours as well as the same colours with different tones throughout your whole website. Some designers even select their colours based on the pre selected images they have for their website. Certain images are just tend to be too exceptionally perfect to be omitted, thus explaining such occurrences.
If you can create a website just by purely using colours and nothing else, you have truly mastered the art of colour design. Good Luck!~
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