By Gregory Smyth
The Role of Color in Website Design
Color is one of the most primal elements of a website’s look, but unfortunately, it is also one of the elements that is chosen most on an ad-hoc basis. The colors you choose should speak to your niche, your company’s personality, and to your target customer. Some of the worst mistakes in website design are in the realm of color choice. We look at how to use this powerful weapon for good, instead of evil!
Understanding Color Limitations Online
To start with, it is important that your online marketing agency, as well as your website design team, have an understanding of the limitations of color in an internet environment. Colors will look slightly different on every display – Macs often display colors with higher brightness and saturation, while variations across modern monitors, laptops, and mobile screens can still cause differences in appearance.
Also, the Pantone colors that you use in your logo and corporate materials almost certainly have values best for printing (they are in CMYK), rather than RGB or HEX values, which approximate color better on a screen. You won’t always achieve your exact logo colors digitally, so look at the colors broadly instead of in detail.
Best Practices for Using Color
The web-safe palette of 216 colors was once important in the early days of the internet, but today, modern browsers and devices support millions of colors (24-bit or higher). Designers now use HEX and RGBA values instead of being limited to the old palette.
Other basic guidelines include using a substantially lighter background than the text for the majority of your copy (it is difficult to read otherwise) and using bright colors sparingly. Bright colors create a fabulous visual effect, but are only useful where you need to draw attention, such as to your offer or to lead customers to a specific action.
There is no right or wrong color scheme, or even one that spells out conversions or web marketing strategy success. However, there will be colors that better reflect your brand, and colors that will better speak to your customers.
Choosing Colors That Match Your Brand
Black and dark colors make your website design feel powerful and sophisticated. This is also true of dark blue, which makes businesses seem dependable. Blue consistently ranks as one of the most popular colors worldwide across both men and women, and because it ranges closer to the middle hue value, it helps promote customer loyalty and has a serene feel. Many online marketing agencies still favor blue.
Reds and oranges are energizing and exciting; both of these colors increase the heart rate and stimulate the appetite. They are great colors for drawing attention to specific places, so using them as highlights rather than as part of your main color scheme is advisable. If red or orange is a part of your company logo, try to use it as an accent throughout your website design, not a main element.
Green is widely associated with nature, sustainability, and wellness. In some regions, including North America, it is also strongly linked with money and finance. Green as a base color can work for environmental sites, wellness brands, or financial services. Purple remains a versatile color that is often favored by creative industries as well as younger audiences – whether it leans toward blue or red will define whether the site feels calming and trustworthy, or energetic and playful.
Accessibility and Inclusive Color Use
- Web design in the modern era needs to provide accessibility to every user base while maintaining visual attractiveness for users with normal vision and color vision deficiency. The following essential practices must be followed:
- The WCAG guidelines require designers to achieve a minimum 4.5:1 contrast between text and background elements for users to read content effectively.
- The use of color as the sole indicator for important information should be avoided because it fails to meet accessibility standards for error states and form validation. The system should use labels together with icons and text for information presentation.
- The testing of color palettes should be performed through tools such as Color Oracle and Adobe’s accessibility checker because color blindness affects 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women.
By applying accessibility best practices, color choices will make your website have a better user experience and a broader reach.
