Did you know that 85% of shoppers base their product purchasing decisions on colour?

Colours impact everyone. It doesn’t matter whether you’re branding your business, designing your website or choosing your clothes for an important meeting: colours define mood and influence responses.

Therefore, colour and branding has to go hand in hand because the colour scheme that a company chooses for its logo and branding will be forever connected with its brand identity.

According to research, colour increases brand recognition by 80 percent and the brand colour has an impact on brand value.

Just as it’s crucial to choose the right colour for your brand identity, it’s equally as important to choose the matching colour scheme for your website.

Why?

According to research complied by web design and marketing company WebPageFX, people make a subconscious judgement about a product in less than 90 seconds of viewing, and a majority of these people base that assessment on colour alone. In fact, almost 85% of consumers give colour as the primary reason they buy a particular product, and 80% of people believe colour increases brand recognition.

If you choose the right colour scheme that’s naturally geared toward your target group and conveys your message, you will be on the right track.

Here are some tips on how to select the perfect colour scheme for your branding and next website project:

Understand how colour affects emotion

Have a look at the Colour Emotion Guide which explains the emotions we associate with colours and provides some examples of brands that use each colour.

From Visually.

Think about your target audience

Who is it you’re trying to reach and sell to?
What types of emotions are you trying to create?

These are extremely important questions to ask yourself.

Have a look at this article from Fast Company that explains the emotions and psychology behind common colours.

Think about the gender and age group of your target market

If your company caters for a specific gender you should know what are men’s and women’s favourite and least favourite colours.

Have a look at the research from Joe Hallock’s Colour Assignments which shows that on average each gender has definite colour preferences.

As you will see, men really like blue and dislike brown and purple. Women like blue and purple and dislike brown and orange.

The same with age group, the same research will show you people’s favourite colour by age group.

Find your primary colour

Considering how colour has an impact on emotions and keeping your target audience in mind, you need to find your primary colour for your brand and website. You might want to do this quiz from Grasshopper to help you find the right primary colour for your business branding.

What is the ideal number of colours you should use?

Once you know your primary colour you should think about how many colours you want to use in total. While there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for this, I would like to point out something that’s called the 60-30-10 rule.

This rule is used to come up with a colour scheme which involves dividing three colours into percentages to create a “perfect harmony.”

This is how it all breaks down:

60 percent of a dominant colour
30 percent of a secondary colour
10 percent of an accent colour

A good rule of thumb is to choose two-to-four colours to represent your brand in various ways. Focus on one-to-two of your colours to make your main brand colours such as in logos, backgrounds, and banners and use the others as accents, like to note your social media handles on graphics or to use in call-to-action buttons.

Choose your set of colours

Now you need to determine which set of colours you want to use. The aim is to achieve contrast to make it easier on your visitors’ eyes and to create a certain amount of aesthetic appeal.

A good rule of thumb is to use a light coloured background with darker contrasts in the foreground.

Consult the colour wheel

I am sure you learned about the colour wheel at school. Going back to the colour wheel can be a huge help for choosing a website colour scheme.

What you want to do is choose either analogous colours that are similar and next to each other on the colour wheel or “complementary colours that are directly opposite each other on the colour wheel.

To streamline the process you can also use a tool like Coloors.

It gives you a quick and easy way to test out different color combinations to give you a better idea of how they would actually look on your website.

This can save you a lot of time and should help you find the colour combination that’s just right.

Maintain consistency.

The more consistent you become with your colours, the easier it will become for people to recognise your brand in the long run. Consistency also just helps your marketing materials and website look clean and orderly.

While you don’t need to use the same colours in all your social media posts, the most successful Instagram accounts tend to use a consistent filter to lend a general mood. Think about the colour values (bright, muted, pastel) that best represent your brand and use them consistently in order to lend a cohesive look. You can also use design templates to create visual consistency around pieces of content or franchises.

For instance, say you post a #MotivationMonday tip for your followers each week. Design one template in Post or choose from pre-loaded designs in the app and use the duplicate feature to remix the design over and over with new content. You can do something similar with promotions so that your followers can start recognising a recurring promotion or feature. This will also save you loads of time!

Conclusion

You don’t need to be an artist to come up with a workable website colour scheme. It’s just a matter of understanding the psychology behind colour and the emotions that various colours bring up.

You’ll also want to have a basic understanding of the 60-30-10 rule and how the colour wheel works.

Following the above tips will enable your visitors to make an emotional connection with your business and can contribute to a lower bounce rate, more time spent on your site, and a higher conversion rate.

If you have any questions or need help with optimising or redesigning your website, please give me a call!