How To Pick A Color Scheme for Your Blog

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Blogging · Website Strategies and Tactics

Have you taken the deep dive into the interwebs trying to come up with a color theme for your website, blog and/or brand lately?

Did your eyes start crossing when you started seeing words like triadic, complementary, analogous, tones, hues?

If you’re ready for a short cut, then follow along

The most important takeaway from this post is to understand that colors evoke emotion. They create an emotional bond between your brand and your customer.

The hardest part of choosing your color scheme should be what kind of emotion do you want to create in the people that see your blog or website? Of course, colors and logos need to be consistent throughout all your media, but I’m not a specialist in printed material, so I’m going to stick with what I know.

I did my own research to create this graphic to get an idea of what types of companies used.

Example of Successful Color Use in Business

For instance, think of Mcdonald’s. They’ve changed their color scheme lately, but originally the theme was red and yellow. When you combine those colors you get orange. Red invokes excitement and urgency. The benches you could see through the windows were mostly yellow, great for window displays, yellow also makes you feel happy. Orange triggers impulsivity. So,

you see McDonalds,
you get excited and
something about it makes you happy,
you order impulsively, but then
you feel an urgency to leave

Really genius if you think about it. More customers coming through quickly, ordering more than they intended, then they hurry out to let the next customers in.

How true and accurate is that? I have no idea. I’ll be honest and tell you I got that information from a customer of mine who was a restaurant owner. But I like it, so I’m sticking to it.

How many health insurance companies can you think of that use blue in their logo?

Why are so many recycle logos/icons green?

Two important things to remember:

you should choose your color theme not by picking your favorite color, but by thinking about how you want your potential customer to feel about you and your brand
This stuff is harder than you’d think so why not go to Pinterest for some inspiration?

My Favorite Pinterest Boards For Finding Color Palettes

You might want to go to your own Pinterest account and create a fresh board just to save your favorite color palettes. Keep in mind as you go through the pins that you should be looking for a palette of 5. Two main colors you’ll use, and the other 3 that will serve as neutral and/or contrasting colors. The neutral colors will actually serve to make your primary colors more dominant. You also want to think about contrasting colors that will look good with your primary choices but can be used for links on websites etc.

You don’t have to use all the colors at the same time. In fact, when designing for mobile devices, you’ll want to limit your colors because too many can make it more difficult to read, and can make it difficult to call attention to things like buttons or other calls to action.

Ready for some shortcuts to inspiration?

Grab your favorite snack and let’s browse through some of my favorite Pinterest boards.

Design Seeds – Jessica Colaluca
https://www.pinterest.com/designseeds/_created/

Stitch Palettes
https://www.pinterest.com/stitchpalettes/_created/

Paper Heart Design – Annie Stout – Artist
https://www.pinterest.com/paperheartdesign/color-palettes/

Procreate Color Palettes
https://www.pinterest.com/windandsagestudio/procreate-color-palettes/

Sarah Renae Clark – Adult coloring
https://www.pinterest.com/sarahrenaeclark/color-palettes-sarah-renae-clark/

Ave Mateiu
https://www.pinterest.com/avemateiu/color-palettes/

Color Tools

Adobe Capture

If you haven’t heard about Adobe Capture, allow me to be the first to tell you about it.

It’s an amazing app for those moments you see something in nature, in architecture, wherever and you think, “Wow! Those colors are amazing!” Maybe it’s a sunset, a beach, a mural, whatever. You pull out your phone, open Adobe Capture and take a picture of it. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ll stop here for a second while you check out the images from the Adobe website below.

Coolers.co

It amazes me that coolers.co is a free site. You can start out with an idea of what color scheme you want, explore something from scratch or check out trending colors. And you can export the palettes for use in whatever graphics program you use.

In closing, remember there’s no harm in experimenting with different palettes and no shame is changing your mind a few times after you see what it looks like on your computer screen.

I’ve added a page of my own brand book below to show you the different colors I’ve been using since pivoting my business more towards blogging. Compare the colors I used when I was focused on social media clients.

What do the difference in color schemes mean to you?

If you have other resources for your color exploration, drop them in the comments below. Or if you have a stunning color theme somewhere, I’d love to check it out. Let me know below where to find it.

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