Have you ever thought about why McDonald’s has chosen yellow and red as their brand colors?
Colors have a psychological impact on buyers’ minds. Red can be a trigger for impulse buys, and yellow conveys optimism. Together, both colors are associated with playful and happiness which helps them to attract children (their major share of target audience).
Besides, this color palette helps McDonald’s customers spot their outlets from a distance at night. No wonder this choice of colors was a smart strategic move taken by McDonald’s years before, even when the internet didn’t exist.
Now, in this digital era, many things have transformed, but the psychological impact of colors on people’s minds remains the same. Therefore, it has become significant for top web design companies to choose the right color palettes for brands to achieve sustainable growth and success.
The selection of color palettes may seem to be intuitive and simple, but in fact, there is a lot of strategy, and analysis required to understand which colors would have a positive impact on a specific set of target audience for a particular brand.
Fortunately, there are certain methods and principles that help web designers to make smart color choices that help businesses to showcase their website can convey the right message to their target audience and enable more conversions.
This article is a complete guide that can help you choose an eye-catching color palette for your website. So, let’s get started with the basics first by knowing why selecting the right colors for a business website is extremely important.
Why is Choosing the Right Colors for a Website Important?
You might have thought, sometimes, do the colors of the website have a substantial impact on a website’s success or failure? Are website colors so important? The answer is yes.
The right website colors can help businesses gain brand recognition, attract customers, and win their loyalty on a long-term basis. We all know the consequences of poor user experience, which can also be caused by website colors. Below-mentioned are some reasons that prove the fact that choosing the right colors for a website is extremely important.
Readability
The right color combinations enhance readability and reduce stress on the eyes. Most websites use black text on a white background, which ensures readability. Many websites also now have grey text on an off-white background to ensure content is readable and minimize eye strain.
Attraction
Along with readability, website colors play an important role in attracting visitors and keeping them engaged with the brand or company. Colors have the power to establish the visual appeal of the website in the minds of visitors, and therefore, choosing the right ones is significant.
Recognition
You might have noticed that some brands are recognized by the colors they have used in their logo. For example, Ikea is recognized by the colors (high-contrast blue and yellow) used in its logo even from far distances, when reading text is impossible. The right colors in a website can establish that kind of strong brand identity in the minds of the users.
Precisely, choosing the right color combinations for your website is important, which can be proven by the following facts:
(Source: https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/psychology-of-color-infographic/)
Now that you know why selecting the right colors for your website is important, let’s move on to understanding color psychology to make the right decisions while choosing the right color palette for your website.
Understanding Color Psychology
Every color has a meaning and has an impact on people’s minds. Different colors evoke different feelings and emotions. In a business context, feelings and emotions might be perceived to be impractical, but they actually play a crucial role in buying decisions. Factually, feelings and emotions evoked by colors are at core of branding, marketing, and sales.
To gain a better understanding on this topic, let’s have a look at different human emotions evoked by certain colors.
Understanding the different colors and which emotion they represent is important to choosing the right color palette for a website. For example, it makes sense to use green for healthcare websites as it represents health and nature, and blue for banking websites as it represents trust, security, and stability.
However, in creative fields like website designing, rules can be tweaked sometimes, and unexpected color palettes are chosen. For example, if your competitor has green as a primary color on their website, you can use red as a primary color on your website to make it stand out differently. But, at the same time, you need to make sure that the color you choose should not go against your brand impression and target audiences’ preferences.
Now that we know which color represents which emotion, the next step is to create a color palette for a website. Let’s dive into the details.
How to Create a Color Palette for a Website
Inevitably, aesthetics are significant to make a business website successful and a color palette without considering target audiences, business relevance, and business strategy may turn out to be a disaster. Below is a step-by-step guide to create a right color palette for a website.
Select a Strong Primary Color
A primary color is the one that takes up about 60% of the color on a website, and therefore, it should be attractive enough to steal the show. While choosing a primary color for a website, it becomes important to consider two aspects: color psychology and business context. The color that best represents the emotions users should experience when they land on your website should be chosen. You can choose blue if you want to establish trust and orange if you need to trigger enthusiasm. Besides users’ emotions, just don’t forget the business relevance while selecting the primary color for your website.
Pick Appropriate Secondary Colors
After choosing the primary color, the next step is to pick appropriate secondary colors that complement the primary color and suit your business context. Secondary colors constitute 30% of the website and so impact the overall appearance of the website to a great extent.
When it comes to secondary colors, there can be three options to choose from: monochromatic, complementary, and analogous. Let’s know more about these three color schemes –
Monochromatic: This is a color scheme that is based on a single hue. A monochromatic color scheme includes different shades of a single hue. For example, if you choose blue as secondary color for your website, all the elements are of different shades in blue.
(Monochromatic Example)
Complementary: This is a color scheme that includes two colors that complement each other. For example, blue and orange are so different from each other but when placed together in a website, it gives an attractive contrast.
(Complementary Example)
Analogous: This color scheme includes colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel. For example, red, yellow, and orange are analogous colors. Analogous color scheme can make your website super attractive but at the same time you need to be careful to create enough contrast for legibility.
So, now the question is which color scheme to choose when it comes to selecting secondary colors for your website. Color psychology plays a major role here as well. A monochromatic blue color scheme can represent peace and calmness, whereas a complementary scheme with blue and orange can trigger playful and exciting emotions in users. On the other hand, an analogous color scheme including red, yellow, and orange provides a message of hope and cheer.
Based on your business type and target audience, you can pick the right secondary colors for your website.
Choose Eye-Catchy Accent Color
Accent color contributes 10% to the entire appearance of the website. Most probably, accent color is used for buttons and call-to-action to attract attention. Accent color is in strong contrast to the primary color, and therefore it helps it to stand out and draw attention to important links on a web page. Image below is the example of accent color scheme, wherein you can see the yellow button is an eye-catchy element in the entire web page.
Final Words: Picking the Right Colors for your Website is the Key to Success
Whether it is about designing a new website or redesigning a website, the following steps you should never forget:
- Pick a primary color that complements the energy of your offerings.
- Select two or more additional colors that make your primary color “pop.”
- Choose a background color for your web page that is less aggressive than your primary and secondary colors.
- Select font colors that stand out differently from the other colors of web page elements.
Certain colors work exceptionally well for your brand and others may not. So, proper research, checking out some inspirational designs, and consulting the top UX design companies to overcoming the challenge of choosing the right colors for your website.
