The Power of Color in Web Design

When you’re trying to create an impressive layout and design for your website, that will grab the attention of visitors, color can be one of the most powerful weapons in your design arsenal. Carefully chosen colors that create a balanced contrast allow the designer to control what the user’s attention is drawn to. Without any contrast in color, it becomes difficult to emphasize the importance of different elements of your website.

What is contrast and why is it important?

To a designer, contrast is what separates the color’s appearances and makes each particular color distinguishable. It is also considered the difference in brightness and color in an object. Contrast plays an important role, not only in web design, but in everyday life. A human’s vision is sensitive to contrast. Contrast in colors can be picked out easily and is often used by designers and engineers to indicate visual cues, such as the importance of an item.

Contrast can be applied with different sized elements, as well. Having large font-characters opposed to small font-characters indicates a difference in significance between the two different sized text.

Why do we use contrast in Web Design?

Contrast in web design is extremely useful, if and only if, it can be applied successfully. You can spend all day adding images and content to your website but without the proper formatting and use of color, it may come across as less than impressive or completely over the top -- both of which are equally undesirable when it comes to your company’s webpage.

To give you a realistic scenario that you may run across, imagine adding a banner to your webpage. You will be applying the banner to a website with an extremely dark or black background.

Because of the dark background, we would begin adding a white block of text to our webpage. White is a definite contrast to the black background, but is it the most effective color to use? A few question to consider: Is it truly effective in grabbing your attention? How will you indicate which sections are more important? We can thicken the text of the title to make it bolder. Keep in mind, however, that the human eye cannot pick up on this separation as quickly as it would if we used a variation in color. In summary, it is important to incorporate all aspects of contract to manipulate the way a user views your page.

How do we know what contrast works best?

The distinct difference in color really helps you catch the important parts in an article. At first glance skimming through this article, which part would YOU look at first?

Using the light brown color gives off the idea that this section may be important, but not in all cases. When used properly, contrast can be very effective. Each color serves a different purpose and usually has a defined range of acceptable colors to use. From a designer standpoint, learning how to control contrast can prove to be very useful in design. It is important to incorporate all aspects of contract to manipulate the way a user views your page.

Can you see the elements in this blog article that are being emphasized? If so, you may have just learned something new!