Web Design: Choosing the Right Colors for Your Website

Color is undoubtedly an essential means to touch the emotion of website visitors. This is method of non-verbal communication that creates a physical and emotional reaction on the viewers. Colors can set the right tone and carry a massage to visitors. They can excite or calm, around numerous feelings, and even stimulate actions. Indeed, color is very powerful.

For people blessed with a good eye, choosing the right colors for your website that blend well together and look good in a website should not be a hard feat. However, not everyone is good at it. Fortunately, there is a tool that can help you out: the color wheel. 1stWebDesigner tells us more about the color wheel.

The color wheel is an indispensable attribute of many designers and artists all over the world. This great tool is a perfect proof of the theory that the ingenious is always simple. The color wheel allows you to pick the colors that are harmonious together. The wheel consists of 6 basic colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. In addition to the basic colors, we have extra colors (mixes of the basic).

So, to find a right harmonious color scheme, you need to use any two colors opposite each other on the color wheel, any three colors equally spaced around the color wheel forming a triangle or any of four colors that form a rectangle (two pairs of colors opposite each other). Color schemes remain harmonious regardless of the rotation angle.

Now that you know how to use colors, perhaps your next concern would be the number of colors that you should use for your website. At times, though, this question is really a matter or preferences. However, it is worth noting that only 5% of the today’s top 100 brands use more than two colors in their main color schemes. Here is TutsPlus.com take on this matter.

…use as many colors as you feel is suitable – in some instances, you could use color to differentiate between sections on a website. In that sort of instance you may have up to four or five different colors to include in your color scheme, which can match up to each of the sections.

Although the ultimate choice is down to you, I would recommend that you at least work with two or three colors in your main color scheme – not including a neutral light or dark color for text or backgrounds. Having two or three colors in your color scheme simply affords you the chance to experiment and offer more of a contrast between areas than if you were to work with varying shades and tints of one color.

Carefully selected color combinations will evoke different reactions, feelings and moods in the minds of your viewer. View and study lots of designs to develop your color sense.