The Art and Science of Choosing the Best Colors for Websites

How to Select the Best Website Colors?

There are a few important rules to follow when selecting web color palettes. These form part of other critical website design best practices and apply whether you’re an experienced website designer or inexperienced and using a website-building platform.

Find a Web Color Scheme That Fits Your Brand

As far as web color palettes go, one important best practice prevails. A website color scheme must match the person or business’s branding guidelines. Following this design rule ensures that the website is recognizable. If you don’t have yours mapped out, now is the time to get your branding on track.

Consult Branding Guidelines for Focus Colors

The branding guide you, your business, or your clients’ follow is where you should look for your website color palette, especially the website focus colors. Going through it will make your task straightforward and result in a design that seamlessly fits your brand identity. Ultimately, this is one of the main goals when designing and developing a website, not simply achieving an aesthetic look.

Take Inspiration From Packaging and Marketing Material

It’s very unusual to start designing an online store or website without already having a logo, brand colors, and fonts picked out. However, if this is the case, you may turn to existing brand packaging, logos, and marketing material for inspiration. This way, you might be able to use the most recognizable and popular content to create a suitable website color palette.

Refine Your Web Color Palette

You don’t have to use all the colors in your branding guidelines or material. Picking the most distinct, attractive, and complementary colors to build upon is the ideal way to go. Remember that your priority should be building brand recognition, and not going with your favorite colors or the one you find the prettiest.

Expand on the Web Color Palette

When designing a website, it’s not unusual for a designer to expand on the focus colors with additional complementary shades. After all, you cannot use bright red for every button, tab, and page background. Not only would this look unattractive, but it would also confuse users by creating a lack of distinction between elements and pages.

How Designers Create the Best Website Color Schemes

If you’re not a professional, you may be wondering how a web design company chooses a color palette for any given website. While it may employ a few tricks to create a suitable color palette, it will, without a doubt, rely on color theory to select the most effective alternatives.

The best color palettes for websites typically consist of various focus colors and complementary hues, shades, tones, tints, and neutrals. All these colors should work well together. However, a web color palette should also offer enough variance to differentiate elements and pages in an attractive manner. Here are colors that complementary color schemes for websites may consist of:

• Focus colors. Focus colors are the specific colors that web designers pick to be central to a website. It’s common to select bright primary and secondary colors (known as hues) such as red, blue, and yellow as focus colors. However, focus colors are also generally central to a brand, tying it and its website together.
• Pure neutrals. You may consider black, gray, white, and brown pure neutrals. These colors are safe to use with almost any focus color. As they contain no distinct primary or secondary color hue, they don’t compete with focus colors. When used correctly, neutrals ensure that focus colors remain the stars of website color palettes.
• Monochromes. Monochromatic colorsare different shades, tones, and tints of the same color or hue. It’s possible to create them by mixing pure black, gray, or white into the original focus color. This way, monochromes do not compete with focus colors, making them a top color palette choice for website design.
• Pastels. A color with white mixed into it is a tint, but it’s also common to refer to it as pastel. Ideally, you should only use pastels with the same base hue as your focus colors. However, you may also consider using pastels with complementary base hues in color schemes for websites.
• Shades. A color mixed with black into it is a shade. While it’s best to use shades with the same base hue as your focus colors, like pastels, you may also use them with complementary base color hues.
• Complementary colors. In color theory, complementary colors are ones that oppose each other on a color wheel. If your focus color is red, green is its complementary color, as is orange to blue and purple to yellow. Complementary colors offer a way to add additional focus colors that are also eye-catching but still fit color schemes for websites well.
• Neutrals. White, black, gray, and brown are pure neutrals as they contain no distinct color hue. However, you may also create near neutrals by mixing a pure neutral with one primary or secondary color hue. It’s best to use near neutrals with focus colors containing the same or complementary base color hues.

Popular Primary and Secondary Focus Colors

The color wheel comprises six main hues that are visible to the human eye. Red, blue, and yellow are the three primary color hues. Green, orange, and purple are the three secondary color hues because they are a mixture of two primary colors.

These six hues exist on a color wheel, blending into each other to create a diverse range of colors ideal for web color palettes. Each hue fits into one of two categories – cool or warm.

Warm colors include reds, oranges, and yellows, while purples, blues, and greens fall under the cool category. Blues, purples, and greens bring cool landscapes and weather to mind while reds, oranges, and yellows evoke the opposite.

Beyond real-world associations, each color may induce certain feelings, sensations, and actions in humans and even animals. When choosing brand colors and, subsequently, your website color scheme, a web design company takes all this into consideration.

The meanings and psychology behind colors should be central to your choice, tying into your branding and business ethos. Here are explanations of different colors’ meanings and the psychology behind their usage in branding and color palettes for websites.

Red for Food, Drink, and Entertainment Brands

In nature, spicy chili peppers, fire, roses, blood, the heart, and poisonous animal markings bear the color red proudly. Red is associated with action, hunger, danger, anger, passion, lust, vigor, life, romance, love, war, fieriness, excitement, and energy.

Red makes its way into some of the best website color schemes because of its association with action and strong positive emotions. You’ll find red on the websites of brands from various industries because of this and its versatility.

Popular brands that use red as a focus color for their branding and website design color schemes include:

• Coca Cola
• YouTube
• Netflix
• Kellogg’s
• Red Bull
• Nescafe

Red shades include scarlet, crimson, ruby, carmine, vermillion, coral, maroon, burgundy, and mahogany.

Orange for Travel, Leisure, Craft, and DIY Brands

Orange is the slightly sunnier and relaxed counterpart of red, associated with sunsets, tropical climates, and acidic fruits. The psychology of this color revolves around energetic and fun feelings such as happiness, cheerfulness, creativity, childishness, and hilarity.

You might have noticed that yellow features a lot in kids’ food and drink branding as well as “fun” adult brands. Because of its association with warm weather and sunsets, you may also find it in the branding and website designs of travel companies.

Popular brands that use orange as a focus color for their branding and as part of their website colors include:

• Nickelodeon
• Fanta
• JetStar Airlines
• Harley Davidson
• Hooters
• Etsy

Orange shades include tangerine, bronze, pumpkin, sunrise, marigold, apricot, rust, ginger, and honey.

Yellow for Kids, Manufacturing, and Convenience Brands

Yellow is another energizing and bright color, invoking feelings of joy, speed, spontaneity, youthfulness, productivity, and optimism. Similar to orange, it’s associated with sunsets, summer, and citrus, but also with lighting, flowers, natural produce, DIY, and manufacturing.

Brands that want to proffer a sense of cheerfulness, expedience, excitement, productivity, and happiness opt for this color in their branding. Interestingly, yellow also features as many children’s favorite color, and is often used in web design color palettes and branding for kids.

Brands that use yellow as a focus color for their branding and web design color schemes include:

• Pokémon
• McDonald’s
• Ferrari
• National Geographic
• Amazon
• DHL
• Best Buy

Yellow shades include canary, lemon, butter, mustard, amber, flax, gold, saffron, corn, and butterscotch.

Green for Eco-Conscious, Wellness, Health, and Wealth Brands

Many think of green as one of the most natural colors associated with plants, trees, forests, and nature. It evokes a sense of tranquility, peace, health, self-discovery, exploration, conscientiousness, and spiritual growth. However, it’s also common to link green with money, wealth, and envy.

Eco-conscious, sustainable, and green businesses, or those selling health products and foods, often use green in their website color schemes. Several healthcare website designs also feature green prominently. That said, green makes an excellent choice for businesses looking to convey elitism, wealth, and old-world luxury as well.

Brands that use green in their branding and website colors include:

• Hello Fresh
• Whole Foods
• Land Rover
• Perrier
• TD Bank
• Starbucks

Green shades include forest, hunter, emerald, mint, olive, lime, moss, pistachio, fern, seafoam, jade, and sage.

Blue for Tech and Communications Brands and Government Organizations

Blue can have a calming and refreshing effect, just like the ocean or a cool glass of water. The color has a very relaxing effect, encouraging rational action and thought over spontaneous emotions.

It’s also associated with tech and communication, both in the real world and via digital methods, making it one of the best colors for websites from these realms. It is pleasing to the eye and less likely to cause feelings of agitation or urgency.

You will find the use of this color in the branding of many businesses that wish to appear helpful and trustworthy, like government websites. Blue is also an excellent color palette choice for an education website.

Brands that successfully use blue website color schemes include:

• Twitter
• Samsung
• PayPal
• Windows
• Skype
• Facebook

Blue shades include aquamarine, turquoise, azure, cornflower, sapphire, midnight, navy, royal, ultramarine, and cobalt.

Purple for Luxury, Women’s, Esoteric, and Spirituality Brands

Purple is a bit of an outsider in the branding world, giving off a whacky individualistic vibe. Generally considered very feminine, it is also associated with wisdom, royalty, spirituality, luxury, magic, enlightenment, and fantasy. Businesses and brands in the entertainment and luxury food and gift industries tend to find purple a fitting choice for their web color themes.

However, it’s important to note that while more women like this color than one’s who don’t, this is not necessarily the case with men. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why many brands catering to men and women tend to avoid the color.

Brands that use purple in their web color themes include:

• Taco Bell
• Cadbury
• Yahoo!
• Wonka
• Twitch
• Hallmark

Purple shades include magenta, lavender, violet, indigo, eggplant, amethyst, plum, lilac, iris, mauve, and grape.

Pink for Babies, Girls, Women’s Beauty, and Romance Brands

While not one of the six core primary and secondary colors, and despite the debate surrounding whether pink is a real color, it finds a worthy mention in the list of the best colors for websites. A mix of red and purple, it still appears distinctly unique to the eye. This color is associated with sugar, spice, and all things nice, like children, babies, femininity, romance, love, flowers, and innocence.

As it’s a lot more subtle and wholesome than red, it often gets used to signify chaste love and infatuation. Babies and children’s clothing, toiletries, and toy brands often use pink. However, it also suits florists, bridal services, make-up, women’s clothing, confectionery, and candy brands. Pink may feature in a color palette for a bridal or baby photography website as well.

Brands that use pink with good effect in their web color themes include:

• Barbie
• Cosmopolitan
• Dunkin’ Donuts
• Airbnb
• Victoria’s Secret
• Benefit

Pink shades include bubblegum, strawberry, rose, peach, salmon, hot pink, baby pink, blush, fuchsia, rouge, and flamingo.

The Best Background Web Color Palettes: Neutrals

Selecting bright primary and secondary colors as website focus colors is the obvious choice. Hues of red, blue, green, purple, orange, yellow, and pink are excellent accent colors, ideal for catching the eye, and easy to recall. Choosing a custom-mixed hue for your business also improves brand awareness.

If you are wondering which the best website color palettes for backgrounds are, consider these alternatives.

• Pure and near neutrals. As they are less eye-catching and gentler than focus colors, neutrals make the best background colors for websites. The less brightly or distinctly hued, the better.
• Pastels, shades, tints, and monochromatic colors. Pastels, tints, shades, and monochromes are also ideal. These background color choices ensure that the attention remains on focus colors and elements such as tabs, buttons, and text.
• Tinted textures, illustrations, and images. A background may be a gradient, textured, or opaque, not simply a flat neutral color. A web design company may also place illustrations or photographs as backgrounds. However, it’s common to edit these images to be semi-opaque, lighter, or darker. Alternatively, you may tone them to match your website’s focus colors.

Conclusion

Website colors vary, influenced by a business’s industry and the image it wishes to portray to the public. Primary and secondary colors are top choices for website color schemes. Monochromes, neutrals, shades, and pastels play an equally crucial supporting role, serving as the best background colors.

However, there is no conclusive list of the best colors for websites because the ones you should select depend on your existing business branding and ethos. Remember that offline and online branding plays a key role in website design, and you need to put brand awareness and memorability first. Then, you may choose a web color scheme your customers will identify easily.