The digital landscape is a playground of colour.
Building a business relies on your ability to effectively communicate your message in a variety of print and digital media. Colour is one element you can use to infuse that message with personality, emotion and memorability. However, used indiscriminately or incorrectly, your results will not be what you hoped for.
So what can you do if you aren’t terribly artistic, haven’t studied fashion, interior, or graphic design, and are scared to death of touching the html codes in your website’s style sheet yet yearn to play with colour and inject more life into your projects and online presence?
Tools to try
Fortunately, there are wonderful tools available to help you with that. My latest find, ColorCombos.com, might be just to one to help you explore the wonderful world of colour. This collection of tools lets you quickly and easily experiment with and test a number of combinations in a colour palette.
The heart of the site is the Combo Tester, which allows you and/or your web developer to see how different colour combinations work together on the screen.
If you are looking for inspiration, check out the Combo Library. The library contains hundreds of colour swatches, along with their hex colour values.
Or you can use the ComboMaker Tool to create and share your own web design colour. You can also use the website colour grabbing tool or the search tool to get a quick start — simply type in the url of the target web site.
You’ll find this site very handy when working out new creative ideas for your brands, products and marketing collateral. The hard work is done for you automatically.
Rules to review
Even though there are many options and combinations that work well together, dp exercise restraint and choose wisely following either the 2-, 3- or 5-colour rules depending on your unique circumstances and communication objectives.
Two expert posts available to help you apply the rules to your advantage are:
2-colour rule — Business Colors: You Already Know the Most Important Rule by Pamela Wilson, and
3- & 5-colour rule — Choosing The Right Colors For Your Web Site by Creative Market.
Additionally, Problogger published an eloquent guest post by Thai Nguyen, founder of Wantrepreneur Journey that you can read as well.
The Psychology of Color: Is Your Color Choice Making or Breaking Your Website?
FAIR WARNING: You’ll want to set aside a few hours of creative time to play in this sandbox. Just sayin’.