Website Colors Matter

What is the importance of color schemes for web designers and their audiences?

What do you think or feel when looking at a website like Apple.com? Modern? Simple? Clean? Easy? Well, whatever you may have guessed, they are all correct. The website color scheme can determine the environment you are trying to portray to your consumers. As well as the products you are trying to sell. You may know this or not, but there is a scientific reason why colors play an essential role for web designers.

Essential tips on picking a website color scheme are based on the target audience and the business itself. Though many factors determine a functional and appealing website, having the right color will benefit your business and make a massive difference. Colors generally affect human behavior.

The reason behind any website’s color

We all know that images and photos can touch us all differently. The colors incorporated in the pictures or the images are part of the emotional instigators. Hence, website colors can make us feel happy, sad, mad, scared, and a combination of emotions. For example, the colors we see daily make us feel some way or another.

This type of behavior is known as color psychology, the science of how color affects human behavior. Color psychology is derived from the broad field of behavioral psychology. For example, Blue represents trustworthiness, loyalty, and sincerity, and due to these attributes, it is often a business favorite.

Just about every color in the color wheel will portray some meaning to the consumer, allowing the audience to pre-judge what the website will provide. This is one reason website designers are innovative about color choices and select them based on the web technology they know and the science of color selection. Whether it’s color, animation, or a photo that needs to be incorporated on a website, they are selected with care and understanding.

Good Examples of Color Choices

An excellent example of stimulating color schemes creates a sense of and raises blood pressure, and it may arouse feelings of power, energy, passion, love, aggression, or even danger! For example, many successful companies like McDonald’s, YouTube, Netflix, CNN, and Exxon have nailed it when it comes to their logo and website color choice.

Another example of a color is purple, which is generally considered a low-arousal color. It may stimulate feelings of spirituality, mystery, or royalty. Take, for example, Crown Royal, Hallmark, and Wonka.

90 Seconds to form an opinion

In the article “How to Use the Psychology of Color to Increase Website Conversions, “ Satyendra Singh determined that it takes a mere 90 seconds for a customer to form an opinion about a product. Also, 62-90% of that interaction is determined by the product’s color alone!

Although we cannot satisfy every client’s need, businesses and graphic designers nowadays utilize various colors based on the business goals and lure in the audience. Colors that are incorporated into a website design should be welcoming and pleasant.

It’s about retaining the customer and ensuring that brand awareness has been identified.

Website Colors should be picked based on demographics.

The audience’s attention to color is critical to attracting and increasing traffic to a website. Studies have revealed that females may be more inclined to earthy tones and prefer primary colors and subtle tints. Hence colors for a logo or a website should be selected with the customer demographics, gender as well as age in mind. Therefore, focusing a website around key colors directed explicitly to women, such as earthy tones and primary color tint, will attract more women.

Overall the consciousness of the color choices made by graphic designers, web designers, businesses, and entrepreneurs are vital to overall success and brand penetration.

How to Use Website Colors

The essential elements of creating a website can be easily forgotten, such as color, yet they can play a significant role in your website’s success. Choosing just one color for websites is a design step that requires careful consideration. Although the classic black and white can be chic and classy, it can also be bland. Adding a pop of color into the mix can be an intelligent yet tricky task when you do not know where to begin.

Can you imagine a full-color scheme? “Before settling on a full-color scheme, it helps to have something foundational. This means picking a primary color for your site – the shade that will be used most predominantly.” as quoted in the article, Color Schemes for Websites: How to Choose One for Your WordPress Site.

By choosing a primary color, not only will choosing a color scheme for your website be much easier, but this will also create brand recognition that associates colors with your brand. This will also help narrow down a particular audience you are trying to reach, whether it may be a younger audience, men or women, kids, etc.

Although a few websites can quickly get away with using a single color for their design, such as Morphe.com using black as their primary color. Using at least a couple of other complimenting shades will also help to make a website aesthetically pleasing.

Adobe Tool for color selection

Using tools such as the Adobe color wheel will make life easier when figuring out a color and a distinct shade that will separate your brand from the rest. This website will help adjust your color palette to your needs, starting with a primary color and offering four more complementary shades that complement them.

This tool from Adobe is handy and free of charge, but rest assured that whatever color you finalize, you can be sure enough that they will complement one another. For example, with your primary color in place, you can use complementary shades for other elements, such as menus, lower-level headings, etc.

This shows you that having the luxury of multiple colors in your arsenal allows you to be more creative with color selection and placement. Whether your complementary colors go towards a heading or links to a menu, this will trigger some behavior that the client will remember and continue to return.

Effective Web Design via Color and Animation

Color and Animation play a crucial role in many creative fields. Direction is one of the most critical requirements and necessities for any successful animator to create an animation that runs smoothly. Without guidance on how the animation will look or what colors will be shown in each scene, the whole project would lack any feeling.

Best practices in animation and color have a science behind them. Whether it’s a website, 2D or 3D project, both animation and color are essential in the industry because both can increase the emotional impact of a scene, colors can be used as values of identification, and animation can give creative freedom to the creator thus opening new mediums of art.

The Evil Within Color & Animation

Colors and animation are straightforward ways to increase and enhance certain tones for a scene without dialogue or context. Several colors, hues, and shades can enhance a scene’s emotional impact; like music in movies, color gives emotion. A particular scene’s color scheme can set the narrative further just by using the right color at the right moment.

Princess Mononoke Color Palettes

Another example of color setting the tone in a film can be found in Hayao Miyazaki’s highly-acclaimed animation, “Princess Mononoke”. In his movie, he demonstrates excellent displays of emotion through his color palettes. An example is when Hayao creates a still portrait of one of the characters with a fiery background. This communicates raw emotion and sets the feeling of danger and passion within the movie.

Red is often used as a color of love and compassion, but it can also be seen as anger, hate, and danger. Color gives more excitement and affects our emotions, thus being a great way to tell a story.

Black & White

Think of your favorite childhood cartoon and try to imagine it in black and white; it’s almost like watching a movie with no sound, dull. Adding color adds flavor and lets your imagination take over.

An excellent example of how to poorly use color can be found in the classic game, “Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest”. The color palette of Simon’s Quest is a mess. Konami tried something different than the first game and tried to give a sense of looming fear. Simon’s Quest used a lot of darker and muddy colors in its world to achieve that but ultimately failed at doing so.

The towns were all one flat, uninteresting color. Simon’s character had a black tunic with a red outline, which had no successful compliment throughout the game whatsoever, and most importantly, when the game did try to compliment Simon’s colors, it stayed safe in the muddy green, never exploring with bright colors.

All in all, the color choices for Castlevania 2 were a disaster, and the entire game lacked any spectrum of emotion. It was dull, boring, and uninteresting to look at.

Color and Animation Bring out the Emotions

Colors and animations enable an increase in the emotional impact of a scene. Colors can identify a particular person to a specific role or group. The most common example of this can be seen through the clone troopers in “Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith”.

The film’s most commonly known clone troopers would be the 501st troopers, which bear the standard white armor. However, they have blue accents, which make them more unique. While the Kashyyyk troopers wear a camouflage green to blend in with the environment, which is an excellent way to use color to represent a role or class within a group; or, better yet – an army.

Friend or Foe Colors

Another example of where color is used to identify different roles can be seen in the classic game of the 1980s, “Pac-Man”. In the video game, where the object was to eat dots to win, there are four different colored “ghosts” that try to kill the player, taking on the colors of cyan, pink, orange, and red.

Color and Animation from 1893 Onwards

From the old phenakistoscope of 1893 to the upcoming line of Disney films, animation has allowed creativity to flourish and take on new heights. Throughout the years, animation has evolved thanks to the creative minds that brought this world unforgettable characters and unique stories that we all love.

It is considered the first hand-drawn color animation feature film was Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, released in 1937.

However, Walt Disney’s decision to make a color-animated feature caused a fuss; Walt was told that “audiences, especially adults, wouldn’t sit through a feature-length cartoon fantasy about dwarfs.”

Regardless he took a risk and released the film; later on, the release of “Snow White” began the period known as “The Golden Age of Animation”. Animation has become a more significant part of our life.

Much time and work have been dedicated to making these characters as detailed as possible. For the creation of Merida from the 2012 computer-animated film called “Brave”, a separate program was created just for her hair.

Merida has long, curly, fire-red locks, and to make the hair look as realistic as possible, a hair computer program called Taz was created. Animation has also played a humungous role in the video game industry.

We evolved from the square and 8-bit characters like “Pac-Man” into much richer and more realistic characters like Joel from “Last Of Us”.

Video game animation is very different from animations seen in movies. In movies, the animation has to look good from the audience’s perspective. The changes in animation can be seen through the years, and it has been very innovative.

Meanwhile, the animations in video games must look appealing from all angles. With this change in how we create these animations, the games are infused with life.

The evolution of animation in both the film world and the video game world gives creators much more space to exercise their creative minds. They can create much more elaborate and beautiful stories.

Animation and Colors are the foundation to enticing the viewer.

All in all, color and creating animation have undergone significant changes since animators first appeared. Starting with dull-colored, choppy animations, we made it to bright and smooth feature films full of emotion and life. Color is used to set the mood of the animation, whether darker colors to make you sad or scared or brighter hues to make you feel happy.

With modern-day technology, animation of video games and films and web design color will become more advanced. Some of the worst websites have had the worst colors on them! Whether it’s a complex animation or a simple KISS web design, we have to sit back and wait until a new record-breaking animation and color sets foot.