Colors play a powerful role in shaping how we think and feel. In fact, an infographic by Skilled reveals that 90% of consumers’ judgment of a product is based on color. In website design, knowing how to use colors to connect with your visitors’ emotions and inspire them to take action is an essential skill. Mastering this can make all the difference in creating a successful online presence.
In this article, we’ll teach you exactly how to use color themes effectively on your website. Not only will this help you enhance your website’s aesthetic, but it will also ensure your website communicates your message clearly and effectively.
What Is a Color Scheme?
A color scheme is a combination of colors that work together to create a cohesive and harmonious aesthetic. It serves as the foundation for your site’s look that influences your branding, user perception, functionality, and accessibility.
Implementing a color scheme involves more than just selecting good-looking colors. It requires an understanding of the interplay between colors, their impact on the user, and how they align with your website’s goals and brand identity. There are tools like color wheels, palette generators, and design software that you can use to easily come up with different combinations and ensure that the chosen scheme meets both aesthetic and functional requirements.
Why Are Color Schemes Important?
When designing websites, it’s easy to overlook the importance of colors and focus mainly on functionality. If we use colors mindlessly without taking harmony into consideration, our site can appear bland, boring, or even chaotic. First impressions matter, and we certainly don’t want visitors leaving because the design feels off.
Color schemes are important in web design because they have a significant impact on the following:
User Experience
A well-designed color palette can make your site look professional, cohesive, and appealing to users. It creates a positive first impression and encourages visitors to stay on the site longer. You can guide visitors’ attention to important information or call-to-actions (CTAs) by using the right colors on appropriate sections on your site such as the navigation bar, ‘Buy Now’ buttons, or sign-up forms.
Brand Perception
How users perceive you as a brand is essential for business success. By creating a color scheme for your website and other platforms, you can effectively communicate your brand’s message and personality to your customers. Consistent use of colors that align with your brand’s identity helps strengthen brand recognition and leaves a lasting impression.
Website Readability
The right use of color schemes helps improve your site’s readability by ensuring there is sufficient contrast between the text and the background. Without proper contrast, your text can become difficult to read, which can negatively affect the website’s usability and user experience.
Steps To Create a Color Scheme for Your Website
Now that we understand what a color scheme is and why it’s important, let’s go through the steps to create one for your website.
Understand the Purpose of Your Website
Before choosing the colors for your website, you must define your site’s purpose first. Doing so will guide you in selecting a color scheme that aligns with your site or business objectives.
For instance, if you’re using the site to sell products, it might benefit from bold color schemes that grab attention and drive action. But if you only need it for educational or informational purposes, calming, neutral tones might be more effective for maintaining focus and clarity.
Apart from defining your site’s purpose, it’s also helpful to understand your target audience. Younger audiences may be drawn to vibrant, energetic colors, while professional or corporate audiences may respond better to more subtle, refined tones.
Research and Gather Inspiration
Creating your design in a vacuum is like trying to paint an image in the dark. It can be difficult to see how well or how bad you’re doing.
Once you’ve defined your site’s purpose and ideal audience, it won’t hurt to look at other websites of similar brands within your industry for inspiration. What colors are they using? Are there trends in color choices that stand out? Analyze what works and what doesn’t, and then think of ways to differentiate your website from theirs.
Learn the Basics of Color Theory
Understanding color theory gives you a foundation for selecting and combining colors. It helps you avoid clashing colors that might overwhelm users while allowing you to create a cohesive color palette that enhances your website’s usability, aesthetic, and emotional impact.
Apply Color Psychology
Color psychology helps you understand how colors influence human emotions and behaviors. With this knowledge, you can make intentional color choices when creating a palette for your website. For example, red is often associated with passion, excitement, and urgency. It’s a color that stimulates action, making it ideal for call-to-action buttons. On the other hand, blue conveys feelings of trust, calmness, and professionalism. It’s mostly used in corporate, tech, and healthcare websites. It’s important to be mindful of how the colors you choose will impact your users.
How To Utilize a Color Palette for Your Website
Once you’ve done your research and learned the basics of color theory and color psychology, it’s time to create a color palette that reflects your brand and connects with your audience.
Choose a Primary Color
Start by selecting a dominant color that represents your brand identity. This is usually the color you’ll use most across your website. Your primary color sets the tone for the overall look and feel of your website, so it’s important to apply your knowledge in color psychology and what you learned from defining your website’s purpose and target audience. Think about the emotion you want users to associate with your brand and then identify the appropriate color that best represents that emotion.
Add Secondary and Accent Colors
Choose secondary and accent colors that either complement or contrast with your primary color. These complementary colors can be used for things like subheadings, icons, buttons, and navigation menus. This is when your knowledge of color theory, especially color harmony, comes in handy.
Below are some types of color schemes you can consider using.
Monochromatic colors
A monochromatic color palette uses one color or hue in different saturation and brightness. Using this on your website can create a clean, minimalistic look that often conveys a sense of calm, sophistication, or uniformity.
Analogous colors
Analogous harmony uses colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Typically, this scheme includes three colors: one dominant color, a supporting secondary color, and a third that acts as an accent. This is one of the easiest harmonies to use in painting, as it creates a harmonious and soothing design that’s pleasing to the eyes.
Triadic colors
A triadic harmony uses three colors evenly spaced around the color wheel, forming a triangle. These colors are typically vibrant and contrast well with each other. A classic example is the use of the colors red, yellow, and blue.
Follow the 60-30-10 Rule
The 60-30-10 rule is a simple yet effective approach to balancing colors. It suggests allocating 60% of your design to the dominant or primary color, 30% to a complementary secondary color, and the remaining 10% to an accent color for added contrast and visual interest.
Eye-catching Website Color Palettes To Inspire Your Design
Even with all the tools, choosing and applying the right color palette to your site can still be difficult. That’s why we’ve compiled five of the best website color schemes on the internet to inspire you and help you get started.
Modern and Minimalistic
This web page from Mammut features a clean design. It uses strong color contrast and typography to guide the viewer’s focus. The minimal use of colors allows the content (the climber and environment) to take center stage. This website design effectively uses a cool-dominant palette for context and atmosphere, paired with bold, high-contrast accents (orange and blue) to emphasize action and focus.
Monochromatic
This great use of monochromatic color harmony and minimalism creates a clean, modern, and professional look. The black, white, and grey is a classic and timeless combination that works well in tech and design-focused websites. It gives off a high-end, sophisticated vibe that’s hard to replicate in any other color palette.
Subtle Gradient and Background
This design by Tayler Freund showcases a modern and vibrant color palette that effectively balances soft gradients with bold accents to create an engaging and visually appealing interface. The background is subtle, so the text and main visuals stand out without overwhelming the viewer. The overall feel is calming and nicely fits the “relationships” theme, creating a sense of connection that helps build trust.
Dominant Bold Colors
Bubble Kush sells flavored drinks with THC, and its website design is a perfect reflection of the brand’s personality—playful and energetic. It uses a bold, high-contrast color palette that really pops and catches the eye. Using vibrant colors and playful shapes also reinforces the brand’s dynamic and youthful identity.
Warm and Muted
This site’s design combines muted tones with accent colors that beautifully match the brand’s ‘classic craft beer’ identity, giving it a nostalgic yet modern feel. The background uses a soft, muted red or terracotta tone, creating an earthy, warm base, which works well with its muted lime green accent. This color sets a rustic and inviting tone that works best when promoting artisanal or handcrafted products like craft beers.
Handy Tools for Designing Your Color Theme
Creating color palettes from scratch can be challenging, especially if you’re new to web design. Thankfully, there are some free tools that can make it easier. We’ll show you some tools that can help you pick a color scheme.
Coolors
Coolors is a user-friendly tool that allows you to quickly generate and fine-tune color palettes. It has an easy-to-use interface where you can create random color combinations with the press of a button. You can also adjust each color to your liking and save your preferred palette for future use.
Adobe Color
Adobe Color is a browser-based tool that allows you to create your own palette. Unlike Coolors, you can choose color combinations based on analogous, monochromatic, or triad harmonies. You pick a primary color by moving the tool around, and it instantly gives you a matching palette based on that color and the harmony you chose.
Color Designer
Color Designer is a user-friendly color palette tool that’s mostly geared toward designers who want more control over fine-tuning their designs. If you’re naturally good at design and have a solid grasp of color theory, Color Designer is a fantastic tool to help you create a custom color scheme unique to your brand.
Canva
Canva’s color palette generator is part of its design suite and is perfect for those looking to pair palette creation with on-platform design work. It also shows you what the palette looks like in an example through an image, which is pretty handy. However, one drawback is that it doesn’t allow you to customize or create a palette that’s exactly what you want.
Paletton
Paletton is a super easy tool that helps you create harmonious color schemes. It’s similar to Adobe Color in building palettes based on color harmony. You start with a primary color, and the tool generates a matching palette while you move it around the color wheel.
One of Paletton’s features that stands out is the Example section, which shows you how your chosen palette looks on a mock web page. This lets you see exactly how the colors work together on an actual page.
Common Mistakes To Look Out for When Crafting a Website Palette
Colors do more than just make your website look good. They influence user behavior, convey your brand’s identity, and ensure accessibility for all users. However, even the most creative designs can fall short if you make poor color choices.
Let’s explore some common pitfalls when designing your website that can derail the user experience and undermine your website’s goals.
Using Too Many Colors
In an effort to make your design as appealing as possible, you try to add as many colors as possible. But this could only saturate it and overwhelm your users. Try to limit your palette to using only 3–5 colors: one primary, one or two secondary, and one or two accents. Then, remember to apply the 60-30-10 rule to ensure the colors harmonize beautifully without competing for attention.
Using Color Without Purpose
Choosing colors just because they look good without thinking about their function or emotional impact can result in a disconnected design. Make sure to apply color psychology to influence user behavior and emotions. Each color should have a purpose: directing users’ attention, guiding them to a certain action, enhancing brand identity, or evoking a specific feeling.
Ignoring Brand Identity
Colors have a massive impact on how people perceive your brand. Which color or how you use them on your website design is tied directly to your brand’s identity. Using bold neon colors may seem off-brand if you’re a law firm website. Again, color psychology plays a huge role in aligning your color palette with your brand’s identity. For instance, use blue for evoking trust and professionalism, green for nature, health, or sustainability, and red for excitement or urgency.
Overlooking Contrast and Accessibility
The contrast between the text and the background colors can affect the readability of your content. Neglecting the proper use of contrast can make your content difficult to read, especially for users with visual impairment. You can use tools such as Adobe Color or Coolors to check for contrast and accessibility for users with color blindness.
Bring Your Design to Life with Our AI Website Builder!
Crafting a color scheme that aligns with your brand’s identity and purpose is essential for creating a memorable user experience and building a strong connection with your audience.
Start by figuring out your site’s goals and who your target audience is. From there, choose colors with intention, guided by principles of color theory and psychology, to get the right emotions and actions.
Use tools like Adobe Color and Coolors to help you with your design choices and improve your content readability and accessibility. Lastly, be aware of common mistakes, like poor contrast or too many colors, that can hurt your website’s effectiveness.
Once you’ve created the perfect color theme for your website, bring it to life with Web.com’s AI Website Builder.
Choose from over a hundred beautifully designed templates tailored for different industries, making it easy to find one that fits your brand. Customize everything from colors and fonts to layouts, ensuring your site truly reflects your unique style. Let Web.com handle the setup, so you can focus on bringing your creativity to life. Design your perfect website today!
Frequently Asked Questions
The 3-color rule encourages designers to limit their color palette to only three main colors—one primary and two secondary colors. This idea aims to create visually appealing and balanced designs without overwhelming the user.
You can use any color or color combination you want when designing your website as long as it serves a purpose and doesn’t interfere with your content’s readability. But in general, there are colors or color palettes that you should use sparingly or avoid altogether.
Neon or bright colors. Bright greens, pinks, or yellows are hard on the eyes and can create visual strain, especially if used as backgrounds or for large sections of text. If you find it necessary to use neon or bright colors, use them sparingly as accents or highlights and balance them with neutral or muted tones.
Pure black. One hundred percent black or #000000 in hex code is overwhelming when used excessively. It may lack contrast, especially if paired with dark text, and can create a somber or heavy feel to your content. If you want to use black on your website design, add subtle colors to it so it’s more pleasing to the eyes.
Red. Red is an intense color that can evoke urgency, passion, or danger. While it’s effective when used in moderation, like in call-to-action buttons, using it too much can create a sense of overwhelm or anxiety. Use red strategically instead for call-to-action buttons or important notifications, but not as a primary background or text color.
Colors with poor contrast. Colors like light gray text on a white background or dark red text on a dark background can be hard to read, especially for those with visual impairments. Always make sure to have sufficient contrast between your text and background colors to improve readability. There are free online tools you can use to check contrast such as Coolors’ Contrast Checker.
In website design, red is typically the color that catches the eye first. It’s a high-energy color that’s often associated with urgency and importance. Because red evokes strong emotional responses from users, designers commonly use it in CTA buttons or notifications.
While red catches attention, it’s important to use it strategically in web design. Overusing red can be overwhelming, so it’s often paired with neutral tones or other accent colors to maintain balance. Red can be a great choice if you’re looking to emphasize important actions or draw attention to specific elements.
