A Guide to Using Color Theory in Web Design
When you’re sifting through your feed, what tends to catch your eye? Most of the times, it will be YouTube videos, pictures, animated Gifs, and other visual content. Creating visuals like these and other shareable images can do wonders for catching your customers’ attention and enhancing any article or blog. Even if you don’t know how to design awesome stuff or aren’t creative, you can still work some magic on your designs. The key here is color theory. This theory can be confounding.
When you have a whopping 16.8 million colors to choose from when designing a website, where do you start? Designers learn about different color wheels, color schemes, color psychology and tools, and apps to help them master designing with color.
What is color theory?
Most big brands and companies realize the importance of color theory and hire the best SEO services to provide them. Colour theory is defined as the primary rules and guidelines that surround color and how to use it in creating aesthetically pleasing visuals.
When you understand the color theory you can structure color for yourself to create a more strategic color palette that can evoke a particular emotion, vibe, or aesthetic in your user.
While there are tons of tools out there to help with compelling visuals, graphic design tasks require a little more background knowledge on design and color – especially when it comes to designing a website. Your brand’s site needs to be shown off in a certain way, whether formal, fun, or quirky, and learning a color wheel can help you do just this.
Why do designers need to learn color in web design?
If someone handed you the keys to your dream house, for free, you would be so excited right? What if that house was painted with your most hated color? Or, each wall has a different color which didn’t go well together, what would you do then? Colors may seem small but they are everywhere are have a certain meaning in branding and marketing. They impart a tone, emotions, and more just like how fonts do and this makes them a strong design tool.
Primary colors are the basis for all the other shades, and people can perceive magenta, cyan, and yellow. These makeup other colors we see in varying brightness, tints, and shades.
Traditionally, people considered red, blue, and yellow to be primary colors but researchers found out that users seem to have a better response to magenta, cyan, and yellow. Online RGB and Hex are used to represent colors.
RGB defines all colors as a combination (a particular shade) of red, another of green, and then blue. The Hex system converts each value to hexadecimal so every two characters represent a color value.
Colour can also be classified as warm and cool. Warm colors have higher amounts of reds and yellows and can invoke a sense of warmth and passion in a design. They can also make us feel aggressive and bold. Stop signs often use red and so do other important messages.
Cooler colors contain higher amounts of blue, like cold climates, ice, winter, night-time, sadness, and water. They can depict loneliness, coldness, fear, or can be used to be much more soothing like a blue sky, crystal clear blue waters, and more.
Tints and shades
Increasing an image’s temperature can make it look warmer and happier like a sunset and reducing it can make it look colder and less inviting like an overcast day. Tints and shades allow you to create a monochrome color scheme by adding levels of white and black to it. Saturation on the other hand can make your image look richer and darker when increased and faded and lighter when reduced. If you aren’t sure of what color to use for your website, the best web design company in India can help you. Web design companies are experts and can design your site professionally.
Spice Up Your Designs
You can now use your newfound knowledge to spice up your designs. Colour is a powerful tool and it imparts a specific mood or feeling to your consumers; you would probably recognize Coca-Cola or McDonald’s with just its color alone or even Starbucks. Each brand’s color and website are specially chosen from a list of approved colors to stay in a customer’s mind forever. The more memorable your site is, and the more natural and put together it looks, the better the chances of it attracting your target audience. Happy designing!