Marketing
What emotions and feelings do you want your customers to feel about your brand?
Video
2 minutes
Aug 28, 2024
Understanding color theory is key to leveraging the power that colors have in web design. By applying psychological principles, web designers can enhance user experience and influence behavior through strategic color choices.
Watch the video below to learn more about how expert designers wield the power of colors and what it can do to boost your brand and your website.
Colors have a big impact in our brains, and color theory is how those colors interact with one another and how they can be used to convey certain emotions or messages.
It is rooted in the study of the color wheel, which organizes colors into primary, secondary, and tertiary categories. This wheel helps designers create unique color schemes that work together in different ways and understand the visual impact of color combinations.
In web design, color theory leverages psychological principles to enhance user experience and influence behaviors and feelings. Different colors evoke specific emotional responses—blue often instills trust and calmness, while red can create urgency or excitement. By applying color theory, designers can craft websites that align with a brand's identity and objectives.
For instance, a financial institution might use blue to promote trustworthiness, whereas an e-commerce site might use vibrant colors to drive sales and encourage quick decisions.
Overall, color theory integrates with psychology to ensure that web designs are not only aesthetically pleasing but also effective in achieving their intended goals.
As said above, colors have a lot of power to invoke different emotions in people. When choosing colors for your website, try to identify which emotion you want people to feel and which ones most closely identify with your brand.
Here’s a quick rundown of what different colors can do emotionally:
The 60-30-10 rule in web design is a guideline for creating balanced color schemes. It suggests using 60% of a dominant color, 30% of a secondary color, and 10% of an accent color. This proportion ensures visual harmony and helps highlight important elements on a website. Following it also ensures your brand’s main colors (typically the dominant one) are highly featured.
User experience is crucial in web design. Avoid color combinations that hinder readability, such as yellow on green, as they can strain users' eyes. Strange or clashing colors not only make a website difficult to navigate but can also breach accessibility standards. Ensuring clear and accessible color choices enhances usability and compliance.
Colors play a crucial role in creating visual hierarchy in web design by guiding users' attention to key elements. Bright or contrasting colors can highlight important features such as calls to action, buttons, or headings, making them stand out from the rest of the content. Subtle, muted colors can be used for background elements or less critical information, ensuring they don't compete for attention.
Using a consistent color scheme with varying shades and intensities helps create a clear structure, leading users through the content logically and intuitively. Effective use of color hierarchy enhances usability, improves navigation, and creates a more engaging user experience.
Get more step-by-step tutorials and tips for common technology issues. Each episode of Tech Tips is led by one of Impact’s specialists to help you get expert help.
You can access the rest of this series on YouTube or our Insights Hub.
Using colors strategically can make a big difference on how big of an impact your website makes on its visitors, sometimes even being the difference between a bounce and a customer. Learn more about working alongside professional developers with Impact’s managed marketing team.
Sign up for The Edge newsletter to receive our latest insights, articles, and videos delivered straight to your inbox.