Choosing a Color Palette in your Website Designs

Along with logos, layout, and content, color can tell you a lot about the tone of the website. Choosing a color palette is important because you want to convey the right feeling to the user when they enter the site. An obvious example is the use of dark and light colors. Dark colors can emote intensity and toughness whereas lightness seems carefree and clean. Both can be used strategically to showcase the content of the site you are designing.

When building a site from scratch the company may or may not have a set of colors or themes already attached to it. If they have a pretty standard color scheme in place, using those colors and lighter/darker variations for contrast  can be a simple solutions. If there is no color palette in place then it becomes more interesting. One site that can help with this dilemma is an adobe sponsored site called Kuler. This is an interactive site where you can browse existing color themes or also create your own. One handy thing about this site is you can pick a theme and then make alterations if the colors are close to what you wanted but not exact or if most but not all of the colors fit your site design.

When using Kuler you can save your color palettes so that you can refer back to them at any time or make changes if necessary. One cool thing about it is that when you have decided on a color palette you can easily bring it into Photoshop to start working on your design. They have created it so that your colors can simply be placed into your swatches palette and they’re ready to be used.