I think it’s no secret that colors have the ability of influencing people through psychological changes and that they are highly associated by viewers with certain emotions and meanings. Wherever we look, we see colors! But in this busy everyday life, he hardly stop to analyze the purpose of that color – we take it as it is, but we unconsciously associate it with an emotion.

Today we will talk about the use of colors in website designs. When we say web design, we are thinking of backgrounds, navigation, logos, buttons and all the graphics the visitors encounter at their first glimpse on a website page.

Usually, the purpose of a website is to sell something, to get the visitor interested, to satisfy his information need and to make him come back. When you’re on the Internet, you don’t get to be face to face with your buyer or your visitor, so you don’t have the chance to apply the strategy of face to face selling. The Internet is a visual and psychological medium, so you have to transmit the information differently. The copy of the website has by far the biggest psychological impact on the visitor so it becomes the most important communication tool for you.

As you may have expected, the primary color in the Coca Cola website design is red, the background is light gray and white which it gives it a better visibility and contrast. Red is color associated with the feelings of excitement and energy and the “happiness promotion” goes hand in hand with this color.

Choosing the right colors is a very important aspect when creating a website, because the colors and the graphics are the first thing your visitor sees. Meaning, the background color, the color of the header, the color of the text, the headlines – all have a psychological impact on the website’s visitor.

The IBM website has a very professional color scheme which includes colors like blue, gray and white. The cool colors give the website a serious, business aspect, creating an impression of  seriousness and professionalism.

Needless to say that any designer should know quite a bit about the psychology of colors and the way a color or a certain combination of colors instinctively influences the visitor’s first impression.

You will find on the web all sort of lists with universal color associations, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be any exceptions – you will also find personal color schemes, as well as color associations with obvious cultural influences. In that regard, the first question you need to answer when you are choosing a color is “What is my target audience?”. If the answer is your target audience is international, the following step is to turn to universal color associations.

The reason I’m saying this, is that some cultures have different symbolism and association of colors and you have to consider this aspect when creating a website design for a specific audience. For example, many Russian people may still have a negative association with the color red, as a symbol of Communism; white portrays purity in Western culture, but it’s a symbol of death in some Eastern cultures; yellow signifies sadness in Greece, jealousy in France but is sacred to the Chinese.

McDonalds is widely recognized by the colors red and yellow in its logo. The website also keeps these colors, the predominant color in the MC website design being red, a color that suggests excitement and is commonly used in the fast food industry as it makes the people eat faster. To give it a serious, formal note, we will also find in the color scheme some black, light gray and white.

You may already know that all the colors are divided into two basic categories or groups: the colors in the red area of the color spectrum are also known as warm colors (such as red, orange and yellow) and the colors you find in the blue area are also known as cool colors (such as blue, purple and green). While the warm colors evoke emotions which range from warmth, comfort and coziness to aggression and anger, the cool colors describe feelings from calmness and tranquility to sadness and indifference.

Type of psychological emotions each color invokes:

Red is mostly associated with love, passion, excitement, danger, action, warning, adventure, desire, impulse, heat, fire, stop, anger and intensity.

Orange is most commonly associated with comfort, warmth, creativity, fun, youth, enthusiasm, celebration and in website designs, this color is also associated with affordability.

The color scheme on the Orange website includes orange (obviously), gray and white. The orange present in the logo of the company is also present in some elements of the page, giving it a creative and energy feel, while the gray gives it a more serious and professional note.

Yellow it’s an attention grabber, it suggests warmth and it’s associated with liveliness, energy, curiosity, joy, playfulness, optimism, sunlight, gold, idealism, but it can also create feelings of frustration, anger and illness. It’s a fatiguing color to the eye, that’s why you will never see a bright yellow website – but it’s a great color for important details or call to actions.

Green is most often associated with nature, health, life, harmony, tranquility, good luck, money, optimism, durability, freshness.  It’s also a symbol of fertility, jealousy and it has a calming effect and it relieves stress.

The color scheme in the Animal Planet website design includes colors such as green, black, gray and white. While white and green are two colors included in the logo, the black and the grays have the purpose of giving the website a serious, professional look.

Blue is the color preferred by most people, especially by men. It is associated with calmness, serenity, peacefulness, security, stability, honor, trust, professionalism, success, seriousness and power.

Purple has been traditionally associated with power, royalty, nobility, wealth, luxury, wisdom, spirituality, magic, mystery, dreams, fantasy as well as with ambiguity and uncertainty.

Pink is usually associated with tenderness, romance, love, youth, innocence, softness and it’s known to have a calming effect. The effects of this color may vary depending on the intensity of the color (strong, light, deep etc.)

Now tell me if you’ve ever seen a website more pink than this one! If you did, I will eat my keyboard! Pink is a color mostly associated with young girls, youth, innocence, romance – in all, it’s a girlish color! For as long as I can remember, when I thought of Barbie I saw pink before my eyes, so for me, Barbie invented pink!

Brown is a natural color, which is associated with relaxation, endurance, reliability, confidence, warmth, comfort, security and it’s considered to be conventional and sometimes sophisticated.

Grey is mostly associated with neutrality, indifference and it leaves the impression of seriousness and conservatism.

White is commonly associated with purity and innocence. It’s also associated with cleanliness, simplicity and newness.

Black is considered, especially in the design industry, a stylish and elegant color. It is also associated with sophistication, strength, mystery, depth, gloom, death, unhappiness, evil and sexuality.

So after you decide on the ambiance you want to achieve for your website, you have to choose the best colors to portray it. For beginners, it’s best that you stick to simple schemes. Choose the easiest color combination and limit your color scheme to a variation of one, two or at most three colors. If you don’t have a good background in web design, it’s really a difficult task to create a gorgeous website by employing a larger number of colors than that. You will risk to make your website design look amateurish, chaotic and disjointed.

Well guys, this is no simple color scheme website design, that’s for sure! This is a vertical scroll (a long scroll if I might say) website, with pages uniting to one another, each page being in a different color, obviously. This is a vividly colored design, which gives you a sense of joy and playfulness.

As a general rule, every color that you use in the design of your web page should usually appear in more than one place on that page. Some designers even extract one color from the logo and uses it in navigational graphics, text links and another color from the logo to use for background, headers, dividing rules and so on. It’s known that repetition of the color is a sure way to unify a web page.

Guardian.co.uk

Remember what I told you about simple color schemes? About sticking to only a few colors? Well, this is a website that bends all the rules! It has a different color scheme on each one of its categories and when you switch the page, even the color of the logo changes to match the category’s color scheme. See how News are red, Business is blue, Life&Style is brown, Travel is blue, Environment is green. The homepage’s predominant color is blue, making the site look serious, professional – newsworthy.

You will see that most websites repeat the same colors throughout the entire website for visual consistency. Most of you may consider this repetition boring, but it actually has the purpose of reassuring the visitors that they are still in the same website as the home page.

Nevertheless, whether you use a simple scheme or a multitude of colors, remember that the different color should have a close value and saturation, they should express the same mood and they should appear to be a part of a unified color scheme.