Web design has improved and evolved rapidly in the past decade. It began with extremely simple design templates, continued with developed graphic design software and functionalities, and has now reached a mature stage with clean designs and specialist design software.
A huge element that affects the success of a website design is its colour scheme. It sounds simple, but can make a huge impact on how your potential consumers view your brand. Despite the professional and creative stage of web design, we still come across plenty of sites that display awful colour schemes that really disrupt the general aesthetics of the site. It may come down to personal taste, but here’s a list of the best and worst colour schemes we regularly see:
Good Colour Schemes
– Analogous & Complementary Colours
A great design uses both. Analogous colours are situated next to each other (eg. blue and purple, white and grey), whilst complementary colours are situated across from each other in the colour spectrum (eg. blue and orange, red and green).
– Neutral Colours
White and black are considered neutral colours. These create the best combination for blocks of text, lack of distractions and ensuring maximum readability. They also achieve a clean, professional look for your business website.
Bad Colour Schemes
– Muted Colours
Muted colours, such as pastels can be highly effective when used within a scheme of other colours, but alone (yellow on cream, blue on white) you fail to achieve clear readability and instead your website just becomes garish and bright.
– Textured Backgrounds
Textures are not a bad thing, they can enhance a website’s aesthetics. But large, busy patterns can cause a headache for your users and can look very unprofessional. If unsure, just stay away!
A Few Rules to Consider:
– 60/30/10: The main colour in your palette should occupy 60% of your design, the strongest colour 10% and the complementary colour 30%
– If the main focus of the page is text, include lots of white space and use a neutral contrast between the font colour and the background
– If the main focus is an image or graphic element, use muted colours for the background