Delaware.net – Custom Website Design Blog

“Color (or colour, see spelling differences) is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, yellow, white, etc. Color derives from the spectrum of light (distribution of light energy versus wavelength) interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors. The science of color is sometimes called chromatics. It includes the perception of color by the human eye and brain, the origin of color in materials, color theory in art, and the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the visible range (that is, what we commonly refer to simply as light).”
(To learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color)

The basics of color… something we all were taught at some point in school. Those who continued on to be artists, designers, architects, and in many fields that touch our lives on a daily basis, colors are a very important and serious business.

For retail sales, the most noticeable colors from the road are reds, blacks and whites. Have you ever driven by a store and see signs in the window “RED TAG SALE”? Red is a highly visible color and tells you to take action… Stop lights, stop signs, fire trucks, police lights, etc… I think you get the point.

Color affects everything in our lives from what products you feel comfortable purchasing to the color of a doctors office waiting room hoping to soothe you. These ideas of color need to be used in web site development as well.

Not all colors go together all the time. For example, if you are selling Stars for the Fourth of July you won’t want to use Red and Green. As we develop a site we think about color and how color is going to work within your site. It is one aspect of many but very important.

Sometimes we want to soothe other times we want to excite or create a mood for our visitors. Depending on the products you need to sell, how you want people to feel when visiting your site, what do you want your visitors to focus on, or how do you want to lead them around the page, color will be a main consideration when creating your site.

Below are the basics of color…

PRIMARY COLORS:
Red, yellow and blue
In traditional color theory, these are the 3 pigment colors that can not be mixed or formed by any combination of other colors. All other colors are derived from these 3 hues

SECONDARY COLORS:
Green, orange and purple
These are the colors formed by mixing the primary colors.

TERTIARY COLORS:
Yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green and yellow-green.
These are the colors formed by mixing a primary and a secondary color. That’s why the hue is a two word name, such as blue-green, red-violet, and yellow-orange.

To learn more visit: http://www.colormatters.com/colortheory.html

So when your designer asks you what mood are you trying to convey, or if there are any colors you really don’t like, don’t laugh, really think about it and let them know. Chances are you will get a design that will not only be pleasing to your eyes, but effective in helping your users to navigate around as you had hoped.