Choosing A Colour Palette
Before we design your website, you need to think about what colour scheme you would like to use. You need to think about the impression you want to give. Colour choice is a crucial decision in every website design.This will include the background, the header, the navigation and the text.
Colour
First of all you will need to choose a palette of colours to base your design on. Three to four colours are usually sufficient. Anymore than that and the website can look can start to look unprofessional and too ‘busy’.
Using only three to four colours may sound limited, but we can use varying tones of one colour to highlight various parts of the web page. Each computer colour has many hues and shades which go from light to dark. It’s a bit like a colour swatch chart that is used for choosing a paint or fabric colour.
Think about your favourite colours and which one can best describe you. Remember your website is your online business card and we want to get your colour theme right. We have provided some info and tips below to help get you thinking!
A variety of colours and their most common meanings
Each of these colours can enhance the ‘feeling’ of a website
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White - purity, cleanliness, youth, freshness, peace, simplicity
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Black - power, elegance, secrecy, mystery, sophistication, solid, powerful
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Red - energy, passion, excitement, power; also implies aggression, danger
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Blue - coolness, spirituality, freedom, patience, loyalty, peace, trustworthiness, calm, water, energy, confidence
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Yellow - light, optimism, happiness, brightness, joy, sunshine
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Green - life, naturalness, restfulness, health, wealth, prosperity, environment, spring
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Orange - friendliness, warmth, approachability, energy, playfulness, courage
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Purple - wisdom, sophistication, celebration, luxury, royalty, spirituality
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Grey - security, maturity, reliability, metallic, modern, solid, clean
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Pink - romance a feminine colour
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Brown - comfort, strength, stability, credibility, earthy
Our Made to Measure Website colours
If you would like us to design a website for you using the ‘Made to Measure’ package, we recommend using a white or black background, or a light or dark shade of another colour. Screen text can easily be read on very light or very dark backgrounds and therefore won’t tire the readers eye. Remember, all those casting agents you send your website to may have been in front of their computer screens for most of the day and won’t appreciate harsh jarring colours!
With the Made to Measure website designs we offer a ‘colour splash’, which is used with a light or dark background. The ‘colour splash’ can be used throughout the site within the navigation layout, titles, borders, headers and quote boxes.
We have put together a selection of colours that can work with a white or black based website. We are happy to change the colour splash at the ‘rough cut’ stage if you are not happy with the combination. We can also use a ‘colour splash’ of your own choosing, just send us an image of your chosen colour and we can capture the exact colour code and create your colour palette from that. Also bear in mind that the same colour will have a different look against white or black backgrounds.
Some colour choices with a white background
Some colour choices with a black background
A colour palette can also be created from a painting, photograph or even fabric. We can match any colour and obtain it’s specific hex code so that we can use it within your colour palette design. There are various palette building sites on the web to build your own specific colour palette. Our preferred site is www.colourlovers.com. They have over a million different colour palettes to browse through. We are always happy to help and advise you with your colour palette, just get in touch with us.
You can also send us examples of websites that you like the look of, so that we can build a colour scheme similar to that. Also have a look at other actor websites, make a note of what you like and what you don’t like and let us know. Remember to consider colour-blind users – red/green colour blindness is the most common.
Text
The fonts we use for our sites are usually sans serif styles of text. The text you are reading now is a sans serif style. Sans-serif fonts have become the standard for body text on-screen, especially online. These types of fonts are easy to read on a computer screen and won’t tire the readers eye. Serif fonts are different, they have semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. These are usually common in printed materials like newspapers and books.
Don’t forget we can use any design of text font for your web page header, but we always recommend a sans-serif text for the page content.