mindgraffiti

Colors are powerful visual communicators. Colors summon emotions, trigger memories, and are associated with the taste of popular flavors. Red evokes the emotion of love. Yellow is reminiscent of summer sunshine. A purple lollipop represents the flavor grape. A green Jolly Rancher tastes like green apple.

Designers use color to evoke emotion, make the eye travel a certain path, or make something stand out. Do these colors make you feel happy? Playful? Sad?

This design is intended to make visitors feel cheerful when they arrive, and strives to give a friendly impression. Does it work?

There are limits to the color palettes available on the web. Some color combinations cause a color burn - the equivalent of burning out your eyes on a screen, because of the contrasts between them:

Notice how the words “pop” out of the page? Try reading two paragraphs of text with these color treatments, and try not to end up with motion sickness or a headache.

Another issue designers have to take into consideration is color blindness. The color blind may have trouble discerning the text from the background, or not even see the text, making a web site with these color combinations inaccessible.

These colors can be used when they are muted rather than insisting on their brighter cousins. Assman Land & Cattle uses muted reds and browns and in my opinion, pulls off this difficult color combination gracefully.

Colors can also communicate how formal of an attitude a company takes. Beige, tan, blue, and grey are the colors typically found on business web sites. Vanguard and Merril Lynch, both investment companies, follow the corporate formula of bland neutral colors, the goal being a conservative and professional look. It looks very blah plain when compared to Nickelodeon’s fun colors, yet all three examples are appropriate color choices for the individual companies. Would you trust an investment company if its web site used slime green and day-glo orange? Yet it’s perfect for the Nickelodeon web site, giving kids a happy and fun atmosphere to play in.

As a web designer, I have plenty of ideas for colors. Let’s say I have 2 customers, Client A and Client B. Client A says, “I like green and brown.” I can create a nice set of colors for their web site like this: . The problem comes when Client B says, “The current blue and yellow are ok, but I want kelly green and tan.” Kelly green translates horribly to the screen. It takes several hours of back-and-forth when trying to match their version of tan, (nearly every client has a different definition of tan!) and their specific colors turn into this: . While these colors might look acceptable as little squares, there is a dramatic difference when looking at them in the context of a design. Take a look at what happened to the design when the colors were changed:

The second design is okay, but not as nice as the first. Also, the design process for creating Client B’s web site will take four times as long than Client A’s web site, because Client B continues tweaking the color palette and so the project waits for color approval and does not move forward. I have seen Client B types whose web site order takes longer than six months to get off the ground. I have also seen Client A types whose web site order goes from a composition (the picture or look for the site) to live (the entire site built and released onto the web) in less than a month. It all depends on the flexibility and compromises that are made, by both myself and the client.

Related Posts:

• The Purpose of Design - an overview
• The Purpose of Design - Text