Website design Sunshine Coast
Colour is an important web design tool for any online business. Some Sunshine Coast business's use the cool blue of the Pacific Ocean or the pale yellow of the golden sands. Some on the Sunshine Coast choose for their web design the vibrant green of the hinterland. Your core ‘offline’ brand may centre around an impulsive red or reassuring blue, but it is a slightly different story online.
It’s not enough to simply daub your existing brand and its palette around a webpage; you need to find secondary colours that will strengthen and complement your business’s identity. Web design identity from November 2009.
Choosing colours
If a brand presents well online, it’s usually because it’s based on a simple combination of basic colours.
The most common colours are your primary colours: reds, oranges, yellows, greens and blues. They’re the most popular because those colours tend not to really go completely out of fashion.
The first step in taking a brand into web design is to look at the colours it uses as a basis. The colours used on your website should work to support these without diluting their impact.
There should be some sort of clear story told through the website that actually links what they’re saying online to your offline brand. It’s really about having one colour, having a consistent story, and not having any confusion. The colours used in the website really should back up the positioning that the organisation is trying to take.
The key is to not get too carried away with supporting colours, as the focus should be kept squarely on the brand itself.
With too many colours, you end up creating a bit of a circus effect, which ends up being no good for anybody. You just end up looking a bit like you’ve created the website at home and not used a professional.
Westpac is a sound example of a business that has managed to strengthen its existing brand through careful selection and use of sympathetic colours online.
Westpac uses a great deal of red through their site, but they also use a grey or platinum colour which tends to give it a little bit more of a premium edge as well as a light purple. It’s a very diluted purple that’s designed to give it a little bit more life, because the grey brings it down a bit. They’re using colours that are slightly muted, but are still getting across a mood without really competing too much with the primary brand.
We encourage businesses to be highly critical when choosing online colours, and to not simply settle for a colour because you might be fond of it.
The colour you choose will have to go with your logo. It will have to match straight away. If you’ve got a really outdated logo, we’d look at changing that straight away. Read more on logos, images and graphics.
Logo and web design in Blue
Blue is very commonly used online, as it’s associated with trust and credibility, especially in western cultures.
There’s a natural inclination to look at the colour blue and feel a bit safe. This is why you quite often find banks, legal companies, or insurance companies tending towards blue if they can.
Applied colour psychology specialist Karen Haller also points out that blue is common among social network brands.
The social media giants – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – have all chosen blue to represent their brand, all using different tones that in themselves have their own subtle meanings.
Blue is the colour of the intellect, the mind, making it the colour of communication, and when you think about social media, it’s all about communicating.
Blue is particularly useful for companies that need to elicit the customer’s trust. Web design trust from January 2008.
It’s really about decisions which are fairly high involvement – where there’s a high penalty to pay through making the wrong decision – as opposed to low involvement like buying toothpaste. Choosing a lawyer or choosing a bank or an insurance company is pretty important, so those sort of companies tend towards the blues.
Entering the ‘Facebook blue’ hex code (3B5998) into the ‘triad’ setting of the colour wheel, and adjusting the white colour points will show you how the social media service arrived at the subtle shade of green currently used in the Facebook Mobile illustration and ‘sign up’ button on its landing page.
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