Steal These 6 Color Tricks From Award-Winning Websites

Key Concepts

• Single Accent Color: Using one dominant color to draw attention to key elements.
• Monochrome Scheme: Utilizing various shades and tints of a single hue.
• Complementary Colors: Colors opposite each other on the color wheel, creating strong contrast.
• Matching Tones: Ensuring different colors in a palette have similar saturation and lightness levels.
• Color Psychology: Leveraging the emotional and cultural associations of colors.
• Appropriate Palettes: Selecting colors that align with the brand's message and industry.

Six Techniques for Effective Color Use in Graphic Design

This video explores six techniques employed by award-winning websites to master color in graphic design, enabling viewers to understand and apply these principles effectively.

1. Single Accent Color

This technique involves using a single, distinct color to highlight crucial elements, guiding the user's eye and improving navigation.

• Google Research Website:
  • A blue button serves as a prominent call to action, placed centrally to attract attention.
  • The same blue is used subtly to underline the active page in the navigation, aiding user orientation.
  • The accent color is also applied to the beginning of sentences to facilitate page scanning.
  • Despite a predominantly black and white and photographic aesthetic, the blue accent for headlines and loading icons effectively guides the user through the site.
• Relax Website:
  • Initially, the site appears black and white with full-screen video.
  • As the user scrolls, a bright orange accent color emerges, prominently featured in product images and then integrated into the user interface.
  • This orange is used for UI elements like arrows and a small dot in the bottom left corner, consistently guiding the eye despite its small size.
  • The accent color enhances the understandability of the UI against blurred background cards and a black and white scheme.

2. Monochrome Scheme

This approach utilizes different shades, tints, and tones of a single hue to create a cohesive and sophisticated palette.

• Lando Norris Personal Website:
  • The site employs shades of green, with a lime-yellow green prominent in the navigation.
  • Upon opening the navigation, a range of green shades is revealed, from a dark olive background to subtly tinted off-gray greens.
  • This monochrome scheme, despite appearing to have multiple colors, is fundamentally based on green, with variations in saturation and lightness.
  • The primary goal is to emphasize the brand color, a bright neon yellow-green, which is also seen on Lando Norris's racing helmet, reinforcing his brand identity.
  • The consistent use of this green palette, without introducing distracting colors, effectively emphasizes the brand.
  • The footer displays various colors that, upon closer inspection, are all similar hues, demonstrating variations in saturation and lightness within the green spectrum.

3. Complementary Colors

This technique uses colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel to create strong contrast and a sense of balance.

• Chanel's Blue Chanel Perfume Website:
  • The primary colors are blue (reflecting the perfume's name) and gold.
  • Blue and gold are complementary colors, creating a balanced and harmonious visual.
  • The deep blue evokes a luxurious, sapphire-like feel, while gold suggests preciousness, reinforcing the product's luxury positioning.
  • This scheme is consistently applied throughout the photography and subtly in the UI.
  • A very dark blue is used for the interface background, providing a stable ground and aiding contrast, a common practice with dark or very light backgrounds.
  • Gold accents, like a button at the bottom, are paired with a blue navigation bar at the top, maintaining the consistent two-color scheme.
  • A subtle gradient adds depth and sophistication.
• Urban Jurgensson Watch Manufacturing Website:
  • This site also uses blue and gold, targeting a luxury market.
  • However, it allows for more variation within the blue shades, deviating from the strict formality of Chanel.
  • The use of different blues, including a royal blue, aims to convey a sense of variety, humaneness, and craft.
  • This looser application of the complementary scheme creates a more relaxed and relatable feel, fostering a creative spirit.
  • The palette is consistent with various photography styles and illustrations, always incorporating yellow or gold alongside different blues.
  • The relaxed atmosphere, with smiling workers, contrasts with the more serious tone of the Chanel site.

4. Matching Tones

This method involves using a palette with multiple colors, but ensuring they all share similar saturation and lightness levels, allowing them to coexist harmoniously.

• Unnamed Website with Primary Colors and Accents:
  • The site features icons with primary colors (red, blue, yellow) and additional colors like green and purple.
  • The key to their cohesion is that all these colors have matching tones (saturation and lightness).
  • If one color were desaturated or overly bright, it would disrupt the scheme.
  • The consistent use of black for icons and colors with matching tones allows them to work together effectively.
  • The principle is that a dusty red would not pair well with a saturated green, but matching tones create a unified visual universe.

5. Color Psychology

This technique leverages the emotional and cultural associations of colors to communicate specific feelings and messages.

• Website with a Child and Blue:
  • A child with blue eyes and a light blue background are used.
  • The blue evokes a sense of calmness, appropriate for a child in a serene state.
  • A vibrant red, typically associated with danger, would be incongruous here.
  • The specific sky-blue hue with a gradient enhances the calm aesthetic.
• Maggie App (for Parents):
  • This app uses a playful palette with various colors for different buttons.
  • While this might deviate from traditional UI best practices, the colors work together to communicate playfulness.
  • Desaturated forest green on lemon yellow, and a pinkish hue, contribute to this playful feel.
  • The goal is to convey fun, memory-making, and stress reduction for parents.
  • Unlike traditional, highly saturated primary colors often seen in children's contexts (which can appear cheap), Maggie uses more refined tones and shades.
  • This approach appeals to the target audience (mothers) by conveying quality and maturity while retaining a sense of fun.
  • The colors are chosen to be appealing to adults, relating to children without being garish or overwhelming, unlike the colors of actual children's toys.

6. Appropriate Palettes

This involves selecting colors that are contextually relevant to the brand's industry, message, and desired emotional impact.

• Architecture Firm Website:
  • The site relies solely on colors and typography, eschewing traditional architectural photography.
  • The palette includes colors of nature: blue (sky), green (plants), beige-gray (earthy, grounding), and a warm yellow (sunshine).
  • This palette creates a counterpoint to the cool blue and evokes a sense of nature and grounding.
  • The menu reveals more earthy colors like brick and clay, further building on the scheme.
  • The palette is described as an abstracted version of an outdoor scene, with a split complementary feel (blue, yellow, green).
  • This approach provides a point of difference from typical architecture websites that use white or black backgrounds.
  • The colors evoke materiality and a grounded feel without relying on texture.
• Content Production Studio (Comedy Focus):
  • The site uses red and blue with an off-white background.
  • While red and blue are often complementary, here they create a temperature contrast (warm red, cool blue), generating dynamic tension suitable for comedy.
  • These colors are also deeply ingrained in national flags (USA, Russia, UK, France), symbolizing power, heritage, and unity.
  • However, the desaturated shades of red and blue used here give the site a vintage, mid-century feel, differentiating it from patriotic themes.
  • The deep blue provides a stable background, while the warm red creates space and ambiguity, contributing to the comedic tone.
  • The carefully crafted shades of red and blue convey professionalism and quality, aligning with the high-quality video content produced.
  • The palette avoids looking patriotic or nationalist, instead creating a retro, nostalgic, yet expertly crafted aesthetic that resonates with clients.

Conclusion

The video demonstrates that effective color use in graphic design is not arbitrary but a strategic choice. By understanding and applying techniques such as single accent colors, monochrome schemes, complementary colors, matching tones, color psychology, and appropriate palettes, designers can significantly enhance the impact, clarity, and emotional resonance of their work. The examples provided illustrate how these principles can be applied across various industries and brand identities to achieve sophisticated and effective visual communication.