» Paint the Web Your Way:
Using Color to Create Online Presence

Color is a critical component of your organization’s image. Even if you personally could care less about color, chances are that a significant percentage of your clients react strongly to it. As an astute marketer, you’ll want to harness that reaction. This article will give you the nuts and bolts of how to make the best Internet color choices for your company.

The online environment is primarily a visual medium, so how your Web site appears is one of the subtext messages your Web site delivers along with your unique value proposition. Luckily, unless you yourself are a designer and just can’t let color go, color selection should be one of the easier decisions you make (keep reading).

Color as a Brand Signal
Awareness of color will help you signal that you are just like another company, or very different. Through long use, certain colors have become associated with certain industries and companies, and also with certain emotional connotations. What colors are your competitors using? Do you want to be just like them? (Think of all the banks that use dark blue.) Or, do you want to signal that you are very, very different? (Check out how the transportation companies have staked out color territories: Fedex with purple, DHL with yellow, and UPS with brown.) Deciding to what degree you wish to appear like your competition is going to get you two-thirds of the way to your color choice.

Color as an Emotional Trigger
In addition to the colors of your competitive landscape, consider the meanings of the colors themselves. Look up the corporate Web sites in the table below and compare the uses of color to see how the pros do it. Notice that Starbucks chooses a solid brown that puts one in mind of its coffee products, but it also uses green as a major color in order to convey emotional calmness as well as environmental awareness. Amazon uses a great deal of orange, but calms its energetic message with blue. Focus on the business and emotional tones you want to invoke with your site, and you’ll hit gold.

Given the meanings below, which two or three colors make the most sense for the message you’re painting on the online canvas?

Color in Harmony
Now that you probably have a strong sense of the best main color for your site, what about other colors? Keep in mind two ideas, and you’ll know all you need to about basic color theory for Web design:
· Contrast
· Colors relationships
Of course, color theory is a, shall we say, a colorful field ... and you could go into a great deal more detail. I invite you to do that. But if you’re like most people putting up a new Web site, you want to make some quick decisions, not goof up, and have a good-looking site. If you’re that person, read on.

Contrast is directly related to how easy your site is to read, and thus, to navigate. You want there to be high contrast between TEXT and BACKGROUND. Generally speaking, a white background with black text or dark text (dark purple, dark blue) is the easiest to read. However, if you have your heart set on a dark background of some sort, choose white text or a pale color (like pale yellow or pale orange) to achieve the same “high contrast.” Keep in mind that through long usage, dark backgrounds have become associated with creative endeavors—computer gaming, photography, artwork, film and animation, fashion, design, and the like. If your firm has a creative side, a dark background may work for you. If you are not a “creative” company, and most are not, you may wish to avoid the dark background simply because it does give off that artsy signal. “That artsy signal” can also be accomplished on a light background. One of the world’s leading ad agencies, BBDO, uses a white background, primarily black text, and complementary colors (pale blue and pale orange, 180 degrees apart—more on that later) to create a light, clean, and yet very artistic appearance.

White backgrounds are a popular choice for companies in all categories because of the readability of dark fonts over white backgrounds (from a form/function perspective) and because of the popularity of white as a color that evokes transparency and purity in today’s climate of fuzzy business ethics (from an emotional/design perspective). White on a computer monitor transfers the maximum amount of light through the monitor, so it is the brightest color. To see white backgrounds in action, note the clean look of Shell, Intelsat, and this website.

Using a Color Wheel
See the handy color wheel? Although its mysteries rival the pyramid on the dollar bill, for the purposes of this article, we only care about three simple ideas. One, you want to avoid putting colors next to each other that are at 90-degree. Their wavelengths are set off just enough to create an interference pattern, and that can annoy your Web site visitor. Examples are bright red and bright blue, bright green and bright orange, turquoise and green, aqua and magenta. Two, if you center a triangle or a square on the color wheel, you will find colors that are in harmony at the corners. The triangle or rectangle shape allows you to cut straight to colors that have enough of a separation in bandwidth that they are “easy on the eyes.” (This is called the triadic or quadratic method of picking color harmonies.) Three, the famous “complementary colors” are found 180-degrees apart on the color wheel. Draw a line through the center of the wheel, and the two colors you connect are “complements.” Because they are so different, they make powerful combinations, so use them sparingly. Using these colors tends to be a good choice when one is a main color, and the other is an “accent” that is used in small touches. You’ll see complementary colors everywhere now... and you’ve officially earned your gold star for using color in Web design.

A Final Splash
As you’ve been able to see from our color-focused tour of various successful Web sites, you have broad latitude when it comes to color choices. As long as you keep historical color meaning, contrast, and color complements in mind, whatever you decide for your organization’s website will be the right decision. Color the Web your way, and if you come up with something striking, please let me know. – lisa@mcpmedia.com

Lisa Calhoun is a creative writing specialist for MCP Media and founder of Write2Market.

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