Understand the Color Theory and Start Creating Your Own Color Schemes

17 Dec, 2013

Would you agree if I tell you that human is the most emotional creature on Earth? Would you agree if I tell you that there is something that we all have in common? Something, which some of you may consider as weakness, others – as an opportunity. But in fact this little thing has always been a great part of us, as the main constituents of one big, global society. I am talking about our disability to resist manipulation. In this article I am going to introduce you one of the greatest weapons, which has the ability to affect our emotions. Colors! It may seem a bit ridiculous, but colors have in fact a great influence on us. Some of them we consider as pretty relaxing; others – as aggressive.

Color scheme is among the most important things in the web design.

If you want to make your website popular, if you want people to like it and visit it over and over again, you should definitely get familiar with the symbolics of colors.

The traditional Color Wheel (or 'color circle', as many people may know it) , based on the three primary colors: red, yellow and blue, is considered to be the heart of art. In 1666, Sir Isaac Newton created the first color chart. Since then, many artists and scholars explore and develop plenty of different variations of this idea. Each color has its own meaning and symbolic. If you want to achieve a great web design of your website, you will have to get familiar with the full rage of colors and the great number of different color combinations. For example, many banks use blue in their website as a main color for their logo, for their and their labels. That is because this color arouses confidence and trust; qualities, which any bank would like you to associate its name with.

Here is another example, if your business is selling women's underwear, you will subconsciously choose pink as dominant in your web design, since you associate this color with femininity and delicacy. However, if your site offers men's underwear, pink is probably not a very good decision.

Basic colors:

As we already said, the three primary colors are red, yellow and blue. These colors cannot be formed of mixing another color. They are used for making new colors and shades. When you combine two primary colors, you get a secondary one.

Secondary colors:

There are three secondary numbers – orange, green and purple .You can easily get them by mixing primary colors.

Tertiary colors.

They are formed by mixing a primary color and a secondary color. You can get a great number of tertiary colors.

How Color palette's affect your website sales

Different types of color palettes.

Monochromatic palette:

In the monochromatic palette the 'artist' or in our case the web designer uses different variations of the luminance and the saturation of one and the same color. In fact, this is the easiest way for beginners to improve their web designer skills and learn how to work with colors. The only disadvantage is that sometimes there is a lack of contrast.

Analogous colors

The analogous palette includes colors, which stand next to each other in the circle. One of them is a dominant and the rest are used to enrich and complement the whole image. It is considered as more effective than the first one.

Additional palette

This palette consists of colors that opposite to each other in the color chart. The best combination is to choose warm colors that will contrast perfectly to the cold shades on the other side of the circle. Again, one of the colors is chosen as a dominant and the rest – for some additional accents. This is one of the greatest color-scheme options.

Understand the Color Theory and Start Creating Your Own Color Schemes