This will seem like
a pansy pants things to talk about, but great color schemes set the mood for a site. Who are we kidding anyways, as an entrepreneur, you’ve probably already day dreamed about logos and business cards and all of the other sexy things that CEOs worry about. Colors are just as important as the shape of your product and the font of your logo. This became really clear to me when I finally saw some great ones.
I don’t know how I got down the rabbit-hole of colors but it was probably from reading blog articles about themes. I had always assumed I would have a nice, simple white background with maybe a few colors here and there. I knew that I definitely wanted a red font for the main logo. I’m pretty sure I was wrong about all of that when I discovered this post, written by Mary Stribley:
48, 49, 50!
Pretty cool stuff there. Looking at all of those great sites almost makes me wish that I had hired a design company. Almost.
Luckily, there are a few other articles about choosing a color scheme, or palette, and more than you’d ever want to know about color theory. I will definitely not talk about that at all.
But I Will Talk About
Stealing. Is ripping off a good looking website’s theme and color palette copywrite infringement? Is it plagiarism? I kind of think so. Sure, there is no way to not be similar, and in some cases be downright similar, but try to be different. I took one of the schemes that Mary highlighted and used a pretty neat tool, Color-Hex, to learn more about the computerized properties of the colors. The first thing I did was to take a scheme I liked and look at the first color’s related colors using the Color-Hex tool. I found one I liked and then used the complementary color and shade/tint pickers to work my way through a few colors. Be sure to choose a font color too, I forgot until I needed it a few days later.
I found it pretty useful to make a one page document that I keep open while editing the site that has a screen shot of all of my chosen colors and their corresponding hex, RBB and RGBa codes. This lets me easily edit photos and files – especially when I have no clue how to set up palettes in my editing software.
Hope this was useful, have fun picking out some great colors.
Hint: (use CTRL+SHFT+I in a Chrome browser to look at the content, and colors, of the websites you regularly visit)