Finding the Right Design Palette for Your Website

When you start developing your brand-new website, one of the most important aspects of perfecting your website is the colour palette – which can sometimes be a challenging job!

A website should showcase your brand’s identity — a cohesive, unified image that reflects your brand. This can be achieved by combining text and images in an attractive colour palette, font, and icon set (or icon set).

Let’s delve deeper into examining the different choices that you might have to make on your journey of creating your dream website design.

Picking a colour palette

Colours can have a massive influence on how your visitors feel and perceive your website when they visit and choosing the right colour combinations is the most important component of an excellent web design. For example, when selecting your colour palette, you want to choose colours that are going to stand out for your CTA buttons, so new visitors can quickly navigate around your website.??

There are five different ways to choose your colour palette:

● ? ? Complementary colours: These colours sit opposite each other on the colour wheel. For example, pairing up a warm colour like orange with a cool colour like blue.

● ? ? Split complementary colours: This involves the use of three colours. Choose your base colour (red), and then find your complementary colour (green), and then use the two colours on either side (yellow-green and blue-green).

● ? ? Triads and tetrads: Triads – are any three colours that are equidistant (equal distance apart) on the colour wheel. Tetrads – are any four colours that are equidistant on the colour wheel.

● ? ? Analogous colours: These combinations sit next to each other on the colour wheel, e.g., red, red-violet, blue-violet, and blue.

● ? ? Monochromatic colours: A colour scheme that uses only one colour in different shades, tones, and tints.

When collating a colour palette for your website, try to keep it basic by using a limited number of colours. As a general rule of thumb, you should use no more than 3 or 4 major colours in your design.

Choosing a font/s

Like colour, typography can have the same effect on your visitors when visiting your website.

Here are some examples of what fonts you can choose from:

● ? ? Serif fonts: A serif is defined as the additional stroke that is present at the end of some letters' primary vertical and horizontal strokes. Times New Roman, Palatino Linotype, or Georgia are some examples. They have a professional and authoritative appearance and are ideal for lengthy blocks of text, such as the body material on your website.

● ? ? Sans serif fonts: This family of fonts is similar to the serif fonts they just do not contain the serifs at the ends of the vertical and horizontal strokes. They are simple, easy to read, and up to date.

● ? ? Slab serif fonts: Slab serif fonts are great for logos, headlines, subheadings, and even body text because they are bold, geometric, and blocky. Rockwell, Soho, Memphis, and ITC Lubalin Graph are some examples.

● ? ? Script fonts: Script fonts are fonts that mimic cursed handwriting. Script fonts can be hard to read in small sizes, but they can work well as headlines or subheadings on a landing page.

The primary font for your website should be based on your brand's logo. However, if your logo font is used for the headline-level text you may want to utilise it in your other fonts to maintain brand coherence.

Incorporating icons onto your website

Icons are images that represent words or ideas – a picture speaks a thousand words. Consider how many of the world’s most recognisable businesses can be identified just by spotting their logo.

Icons are a good way to draw attention to important parts of a website and guide the user's journey. Think about the social media buttons that businesses integrate into their websites. Users know that when they click the button, it will redirect them to their social media profiles.

Consider how you want your brand to be portrayed and what sort of impressions you want to make when creating an icon or logo for your company. The shapes that you choose should mirror your overall style and message. For example, if you have a soft colour scheme and a modern font, you might want to use simple icons within your icons. On the other hand, if your brand is bold and loud, you might want to incorporate geometric shapes and bright colours to complement your brand personality.

There are a lot of things that you need to take into consideration when it comes to building a successful web design. If you ever find yourself in a rut, Elephant in the Boardroom is here to help you out!

Elephant in the Boardroom is a Melbourne-based web design and development company that can help you achieve your website goals. You can sit back, relax, and let our team of talented web designers, developers, and content creators handle your projects.

Contact us today!