How to Choose a Color Scheme for Your Website
A good color scheme can make a website appear more attractive and vibrant, while a bad one can be a real turn-off.
Many of us aren't gifted when it comes to the selection of colors (my wife still has to tell me which tie goes with which suit). If you fall into that category, the best advice we can give is to play it safe and choose colors which are fairly neutral. Looking at this site, you'll that that's what we did.
Since we've just admitted to not being gifted in this area, you should consider this just a brief introduction, to give you something to think about. If you want to look into this further, there's enough information available on color theory to keep you going for a long time.
The Color Wheel
We've all seen the well-known color wheel:
Complementary Colors
Colors on opposite sides of the wheel are known as complementary. They contrast strongly which can give a vibrant look in small doses (such as in a site logo or banner), but can be overpowering if used throughout a site.
Analogous or Harmonious Colors
These are colors which are next to each other on the wheel. They generally go well together, and aren't as glaring or overpowering as complementary color combinations can be, and so are a better choice if you want to use colors in larger areas of your site. The downside, is that because they're not as vibrant, they don't catch the eye as well as complementary combinations, so they may not be as well suited to use in smaller areas such as logos.
Free Color Choosing Tools
If you look around, you'll find lots of resources covering color theory and recommended color schemes. We particularly like the following:
The Color Scheme Generator from Wellstyled.com. This allows you to choose a main color from the wheel, and then shows various color schemes based on this. Different schemes can be selected using the Mono, Contrast, Triad etc. buttons, and these can be varied using the Default, Pastel, Dark Pastel etc. buttons.
ColorMatch 5K. Choose one color by adjusting the sliders on the red, green and blue lines, and it will then generate a palette of matching colors based on this.
The Color Calculator from the Sessions Online School of Design. This allows you to select colors from the wheel, and adjust the saturation and brightness values to see how different combinations work.
Whatsitscolor. Select an image, either from disk or from the internet, and it will analyze the colors to identify the dominant average color plus the 10 most-used colors in the image.
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