A palette is a entire set of colors one should adhere to
when designing a website. This includes a color scheme plus some extra colors
to work with. The goal along the design process is to stick to these colors
without the need of invent and introducing new ones. Here are some tools and
knowledge on how to design and generate an effective and appealing color
palette for you website in just minutes:
Recognize your primary color
Many times you will be constraint by your clients require
for a primary color, be it because of the logo, corporate identity (CI) or
corporate design (CD) guidelines. For the other times when you have to come up
with a color for yourself, think of what best represent the company's aim
audience young, fashion, pop, serious, technocratic, playful. All that will resolve
your ultimate choice. The best description I have found so far of what special
colors actually stand for is in Jason Beaird's book 'The Principles of Beautiful
Web Design'. Even though I am sure you find tons of other sources on the web be
aware of easy color-meaning mappings like black=death - in web design black is
also a color that convey power, think of tuxedos, limosines, Batman etc.
Generate a Color Scheme
I have found the Red-Yellow-Blue color wheel the closest to
traditional color theory and that's what I am using and writing about now. I
acknowledge the CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black) color wheel but found it less helpful
for my purposes. I highly suggest the WellStyled Color Scheme Generator 2. It
allows you to use your primary color and your knowledge about your target
audience to play around and find the most right of the five classic color
schemes:
monochromatic
(your primary color in special tints or shades)
analogous (your
primary color plus two colors next to it on the wheel)
complementary (your
primary color plus the reverse color on the wheel)
triadic (three
colors evenly separated on the wheel)
tetradic (fundamentally
two complementary schemes combined)
The Color Scheme maker will calculate the correct RGB values
in hexadecimal notation for you and even offer variations to further
experiment. Once done, simply print or note the colors and values compute and
you are ready to roll.
Ensure good Contrast
Contrast is not only a good design principle but also an
Accessibility necessity for many websites. So before you make your final choice
on the color scheme make sure that your main color provides sufficient contrast
to background/foreground colors. Test your colors using Colour Contrast Check making
sure the brightness variation is greater 124 and the color difference is not
less than 500.
Finalize your Color Palette
To finalize your color palette all you require to determine
is which other tints and shades of the existing color scheme you want to use black
and white included. As a basic rule try not to 'overload' your page with the
amount of colors used, but surely a number of 5 or 6 seems to be about right.
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