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Choosing the right colors for your website (part 2)

Posted on June 29th, 2008.

I’ve talked about tools to help you create color schemes for your website, but what colors should you actually choose? To use a color scheme generator effectively, you need an idea of the kind of color scheme you want.

Creating any color scheme begins with choosing a base color. To help you choose a base color, it’s useful to jot down a few lines on who your website’s target audience will be, and what message you want your website to convey. A few lines on your website purpose would also be useful.

Once you’ve got all that down you’re ready to start thinking about a base colour.

Different colors convey different emotions. I’m not going to regurgitate the same information which can be found all over the web, so instead here are a few useful links.

• You can find out about the meanings of different colors on this site: http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-meaning.html
• This site also has a tonne of information on color symbolism, and color meanings: http://www.colormatters.com/brain.html
• This is a great flash video about colors, and their meanings. I highly recommend it: http://www.mariaclaudiacortes.com/colors/Colors.html

Colors play an important role in non-verbal communication, and so by tailoring your color scheme towards your target audience, you can make your website instantly more appealing. You can communicate your message even more effectively by using colors associated with particular emotions. For example, say I created a site to vent my anger at something. I could use a dark shade of red as the base color, because the color red is associated with anger.

Also remember that different colors have different meanings in different cultures, and so it’s important to define your target audience so that your color scheme can be tailored towards a particular culture, if it needs to be.

Once you’ve decided on a base color based on the emotions you want to convey and your target audience. You need to choose other colors, or at least different shades of the same color. The type (e.g. monochromatic or analogous) of color scheme you choose is also going to have an effect on the message your website conveys.

Again, I’m not going to regurgitate the same information which is found on tonnes of websites, so here is a link which I think highlights the different messages which the different types of color schemes convey.

• http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/color2.htm

I guess choosing a color scheme is made up of two parts. Choosing a good base color, and then choosing the right type color scheme. Therefore I stress before choosing any color for your website that you do a little research. First, as I mentioned above, figure out your target audience of your site, and the message you want your website to send out, and from there start to work on making the right choices.

Other useful links related to choosing colors:

• http://www.creativebehavior.com/index.php?PID=42
• http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/color2.htm - this page contains a large number useful links at the bottom of it.
• http://newark1.com/color/000055.html

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