Colours are significant in how we perceive the world. Although we barely notice it, their influence is prevalent. This influence also extends to websites. Your website’s colour scheme can impact your visitors’ first impressions and brand recognition.
A website’s colour scheme can be appealing or not for users. Your colour palette should be visually pleasing to encourage visitors to stay and engage with your website. For this reason, choosing the perfect colour scheme is essential to your website development.
Choosing the perfect colour scheme can be overwhelming, especially when unfamiliar with colour combinations. The process involves experimentation with bold, vibrant, and soft colours.
In this post, you’ll learn about the importance of website colour schemes and how to choose the perfect ones. We will also discuss some of the best colour palettes, trends, and brands with recognisable colours for your reference.
What’s the best colour scheme for websites?
The best website colour scheme aligns and complements your business’s brand. Some colour palette trends most brands use include pastels with bright colours, jewel tones, and hot colours with monochromes. Still, your colours must be unique and easily recognisable because the goal is to build strong brand recognition and user engagement.
Here are some of the famous brands with distinct colour palettes that you can use as a reference:
- FedEx
- Mastercard
- McDonald’s
- Starbucks
- Snapchat
- Netflix
- Amazon
The Importance of Colour Scheme in Your Website
Website colour schemes are not just simple colours you decide to combine. If your website’s colour palette is unappealing, you risk losing potential customers or clients interested in your offers.
Let’s look at why proper colour schemes are essential for your website.
Brand recognition
Brand recognition refers to the users’ familiarity with your brand, which is crucial for growth and success. It is considered successful when users can recognise and engage with your brand through visual cues like colour schemes.
Successful brand recognition is also possible when visitors can remember your colour palette after visiting your site. Even without seeing or hearing your name, your brand can be the first to come to mind. This way, they’re more likely to engage with your business beyond the online space.
First impressions
When users are first-time visitors, the first thing they’ll see could be your website’s colour scheme. They may observe these colour palettes, which shape their perceptions of your brand. This is how colour schemes can show your brand’s personality in their first impressions.
Visitors can understand your brand’s tone by seeing your brand’s personality. The tone is the emotion or mood you convey through colour palettes. It’s also how you express your brand’s voice.
In colour psychology, different colours can have distinct meanings depending on the visitors’ beliefs, preferences, cultures, and experiences. Due to these factors, your colour scheme can lead to positive or negative impressions.
Appeal
Website colours have special orders that can create appeal because they complement each other. There are four types: complementary, monochromatic, triadic, and analogous.
Complementary orders are colours sitting opposite each other on the colour wheel. While they are on different sides, they still complement each other. Examples include purple and yellow, blue and orange, and red and green.
Monochromatic order is a colour scheme that uses single colour. It adds black, white, and grey to the base colour to adjust the hue’s saturation and brightness. In a mono order, you’ll use a single colour with different tints, shades, and tones, like a monochromatic red palette with light, dark, and medium red.
Triadic order is a colour scheme that uses three equally-spaced colours in the colour wheel. You can determine these colours by drawing a triangle on the colour wheel. When placed beside each other, they can make interesting combinations. Triadic colours include:
- Red, yellow, blue
- Purple, green, orange
- Blue-violet, red-orange, yellow-green
- Red-violet, yellow-orange, blue-green
Analogous orders are colours sitting next to each other on the colour wheel—for example, blue, blue-violet, violet, and red-violet.
Using one of these special orders is ideal for creating visual appeal, especially when you have no colour palettes to work with.
Emphasise elements
Websites also use accent colours. Accent colours are bold or vibrant colours that emphasise specific elements. You can use these accents in calls to action, menu bars, headers, footers, or texts that require attention. They help visitors remember the essential details of your website.
Simple website building
With a pre-determined colour palette, your website-building and colour-matching processes can be easier for your creatives. Pre-determined colour palettes guide what buttons should look like, text sizes and colours, and significant elements that need highlighting. It can save time in designing each web page and ensures every aspect makes sense with each other.
Image by Davide Baraldi on Pexels
Choosing the Perfect Colours for Your Site
Choosing the perfect colours for your site doesn’t have to be stressful. By following the tips for selecting website colours listed below, you can create a website that will bring in more clients or customers, increasing your sales and profit.
Familiarise yourself with colour psychology and theory
The first step is to understand colour psychology and theory. These principles can guide you in choosing the best website colour schemes.
Colour psychology refers to how colours affect mood, emotions, and behaviours. This concept emphasises that every colour has different effects and meanings depending on our beliefs, cultures, and preferences. For example, yellow is for optimism, while orange is for fun and friendliness.
Other common colour meanings include:
- Red – Boldness, excitement, youthfulness
- Blue – Strength, trust, dependability
- Purple – Creativity, imaginativeness
- Green – Nature, health, growth
- Grey – Neutrality, balance, calmness
- Black – Sophistication, mystery, coldness, elegance, luxury
- Pink – Softness, kindness, love, femininity
Meanwhile, the colour theory comprises rules and guidelines on colour combinations. It is also considered the science and art of colour usage. This concept covers the colours’ special orders, which will help you understand how to use complementary, monochromatic, triadic, and analogous colours.
Colour psychology and theory will also provide insights into how specific colours and combinations affect your website’s user engagement, which can help you avoid choosing unappealing colour schemes.
Determine your brand message for background design
Once you understand colour psychology and theory, you can start outlining background colours and designs.
Backgrounds are elements that will occupy most spaces on your site. Your background represents your entire website’s messaging, tone, products, and services. Visitors can immediately tell everything about your site by looking at the backgrounds.
Choosing an off-white background can be the safest option, but you must determine how you want to convey your branding. Determining your brand message can help you better decide what background colours and designs you want to incorporate on your website.
You may use muted versions of primary and secondary colours that require white or grey overlays to make your texts pop. Additionally, experiment with unconventional colour combinations to see how they complement your brand image.
Find the suitable typeface
The typeface is how texts will look on your website. Typefaces are fonts that will match your background colours.
A black typeface is a common choice, but it will still depend on the pre-determined background colour palettes. Pure black typefaces on pure white backgrounds are not ideal, as they may strain the users’ eyes due to the strong contrast. When you use a dark background, your typeface and accent colours should be lighter to balance each other and vice versa.
Experimenting with typefaces can be time-consuming but essential for finding the most suitable one for your background colours and other elements.
Here’s an example of a pleasant typeface and background colour blending:
Screenshot from childsown.com
Build Your Brand Equity With the Right Website Color Scheme
Website colour schemes are just one of the factors that will shape your brand recognition, user experience, and conversions. The perfect website colours are subject to your branding. These palettes are the right combinations that prioritise engagements and increase brand equity.