Beginner guidelines for ‘Safety First’ colours for the Web

Using too many colours for your web design can most probably not land you into a wonderful looking colourful page, but rather a situation called ‘Blech’ where too many colours inevitably end up looking just wrong. Working with colours can be a wonderful experience but when you are to create colours for the web, you need to follow a practical framework where the website looks not only well coloured but also make sense. Here are some safety guidelines for beginners for website colour schemes that can help them wade through the tough water (read: colours) through ease.

• Treat colour scheme as the canvas: No matter how much time you spend on creating the most spectacular colour scheme, it will only act as a second fiddle to the star of the website - the Content. The colour scheme should not be louder than the content. It should be just in the background, pushing the relevant content towards the user, without overpowering it. The web design process is so tightly tied with the content that there seems to be just empty space without any content, even if the web design is of high quality. It is thus advised to start with laying out the sample content in design software and then designing around it.
• A simple grayscale base always helps: If you do not know where to start or are flabbergasted with so many colours, start with a grayscale. It is not only the easiest one but also used by a majority of popular websites for their templates, themes etc. The combination of grey base with high quality content offers good readability for visitors and allows the content to come to the foreground.
• Choose a single colour to highlight: When you see several colours, you are bound to choose a mix of many instead of one. The more colours you use for your background, the trickier it gets to keep them under control,. Start with adding one single colour on top of your grayscale base for highlighting headlines, menus, links etc.
• When in doubt, choose blue:  Blue is the most flexible of all the colours to work with. While colours like yellow and purple are also pleasant, they can easily turn garish if used in the wrong way. Most of the top websites use Blue to be on the safe side.
• Use variations on the highlight colour: Once you have chosen your highlight colours, you need to add variation to it by going through the different levels of the same colour. Be it for borders, gradients, shadow effects, or subtler text, it is safe to use variations for the same colour as the highlight rather than go full contrast.
• Stay clear of the top right corner: Colours of the top right corner are of high octane. It takes a lot of experience you use them appropriately. Always choose a relatively subdued colour from the centre of the top right corner.

These are some of the safety first colour guidelines for beginners going for web designing.

Bonus link: How color affect the conversion?

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