Choose your colors wisely

Color can be tricky to use in design. Very few people are schooled in color theory, and most designers and visual artists are insecure about choosing usable color schemes. Tried and true or out of the box? If you’re not daring with your color choices you run the risk of being boring or monochrome. Yet if you go overboard and think out of the box you may end up with an ugly color combo that will ruin your design and turn off customers.

Don’t use greens and reds together, as they generally clash terribly. Save green and red for Christmas. Another common mistake is to use colors that are too similar. Never use white text with a yellow background. Blue text on a red background is difficult to read as well. Use colors that compliment each other and then choose shades or hues of these base colors.

Also consider that 90% of fortune 500 websites use a white or light background with black or dark text. This is because it’s easy to read. You don’t want your visitors and potential customers to strain in order to read your website. Unless you are creating a video game or tech website, maybe a band website, try to stick to light, uncluttered backgrounds for the most part. This will also help to keep the focus on your content and not the website design. When in doubt, look at the color schemes on commercial websites.

Color choosing is as much a science as an art

Not everyone has the ability or confidence to come up with harmonious or worthy color schemes. Also, if you’re like me you surely have off days when all your color choices don’t seem to work. There are many great online tools that you can use to help you create and select great color combinations. My personal favorite and a program I use on a daily basis is the Color Schemer Studio. You can use this powerful program to samples colors, just like every other eyedropper tool out there, but Color Schemer Studio takes this base color and makes color schemes for you quickly and easily.

A few other handy color resources I use from time to time:

• Defence Mechanism - Flash Color Scheme Generator
• Adobe’s Kuler - Explore, create and share color themes.
• Color Scheme Generator 2 - Quick & Simple Color Scheme Tool.
• Daily Color Scheme - In Beta
• pic2color - Creating color schemes is now fun and easy, even addictive. Try it!
• EasyRGB - Search for colors complements to your RGB values.
• Color Wheel Color Calculator - The Sessions Color Calculator is an interactive color wheel that helps designers select HTML, RGB, or CMYK colors and identifies color harmonies and schemes.
• The Color Wizard - The Color Wizard is a color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors.
• ColourLovers - Fight for love in the colour revolution.
• ColorBlender - Your free online color matching toolbox
• Color Calculator - with saturation and lightness adjustment.
• ColorCombos.com - Web color combinations tool and library
• Color Palette Generator - Generate a color palette based on an image
• EasyRGB - The first RGB and COLOR search engine on the Web!
• Technicolor - Automatic color palette generator with realtime preview and CSS generator.

Bookmark to: