Choosing Your Color Palette
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Welcome back to Planning a Website the Organized Way!
If you’ve been following this series, at this point you should be establishing, clarifying, or updating your business brand.
When I was starting Organized Assistant, I read that each color is associated with certain attributes. I chose blue because it represents integrity and dependability, and green because of its association with money: Clients rely on me to provide excellent service in order to help them make more money.
The shade and intensity of the chosen colors also play important roles. For example, baby blue will have a very different impact than dark navy.
Check out the infographic, What colors should you use in marketing? for a quick overview.
For a deeper understanding of the psychology of color, make yourself comfortable and read The Ultimate Color Guide for Content Marketing – Part 1 and Part 2.
When you’re ready to choose your own colors, spend some time exploring COLOURlovers, an online community showing millions of user-created colors and color palettes.
Let’s say you’ve decided on lilac and green for your website. Start by typing lilac in the search box, choose Colors and click on the magnifying glass. If you don’t see one you like in the search results, adjust the Hue, Saturation, and/or Brightness to generate more options. When you find one that appeals to you, click on it to view palettes using that color.
It’s addictive – don’t say I didn’t warn you!
If you enjoy this step of the website planning process, you’re going to love my next post! Make sure you’re on my mailing list so you don’t miss it.
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Great minds must think alike; I also have a blue/green color theme for my business and website! It can be addicting getting into the psychology behind color palettes. I also love seeing Pantone’s color picks of the year.
I find it addicting just playing around with different color palettes – but yes, looking at the psychology behind each color, shade, and combination is intriguing too!
This is interesting, Janet. I have to say I don’t think I was intentional enough in many areas when starting my website. I went with red, white, and blue because my tag line is “Freedom Through Organization” and I liked the colors of our free country.
That sounds pretty intentional to me, Seana! And color combinations like yours carry their own meaning over and above the standard ones.
Janet,
Great info. I have dark and light blue as my main colors. I use a dark orange too. This study makes me wonder about it, but orange is a trendy color in homes now.
Karen, it’s great to see you here! Just this week I was remembering when we met at the POC Conference in Montreal. I love orange and blue together!
Sorry, I had you mixed up with someone else!
Another blue-green person here! (Or is it teal? Or seafoam? Or turquoise?) What I need to do is to identify the exact color I want in terms of Pantone and/or HTML codes, or whatever, and use the same color more consistently on website, business cards, etc. Any favorite tools for that, Janet?
Is this helpful? http://www.color-hex.com/color/8ac1bc
Yes, indeed! I was expecting a referral to a website. Did not anticipate that you would go ahead and pick my website color for me using that tool. Thanks! 🙂
I cheated a bit, since I already knew the color of your website header. 😉
Fascinating! I’ve played around with my website design quite a bit and have always settled on palates that “feel” right. And right now, I hardly have any color! I rely on my photographs to give the visual color pop that draws the eye…
Muted colors can be very restful, Lucy, but I’d love to see your business name pop out a bit more – help people remember you!
Done. And I LOVE it. I have a feeling I’m going to be playing around with different color schemes on a regular basis now I see what a difference it makes. Thanks Janet!
Wow! Do you use Google Analytics? It would be interesting to see if people spend more or less time on the site with the different colors.
What timely information, Janet. I’m rebranding now and while I love my primary colour palette, I’m wondering about the advisability of changing it as the red and blue seem to be giving mixed messages according to that colour wheel. All my websites are mostly blue and red with a splash of yellow and my logo is in those colours as well. Any thoughts???
Here are some questions for you to consider:
What message are you trying to convey with your new brand?
What will be the impact of changing your business colours in terms of brand recognition?