Creating an aesthetically-pleasing website that aligns with the tone and goals of your brand is a crucial element of running a successful business in the digital world.
It is no longer enough to simply have a website; instead, your brand’s cohesive online presence needs to be created by carefully selecting colors and other elements of web design and graphic design that best represent your brand and appeal to your target audience.
Color theory goes beyond choosing colors purely for their appearance and seeks to identify ways that brands can use specific colors to shift viewers’ moods and feelings. Fresh First, South Florida Sinus & Allergy Center, Ball Cap Liner, and EDSA are four examples of companies that have effectively used C&I Studios’ web design services and techniques, particularly our color expertise, to create websites that showcase their brand’s personality.
What Is Color Theory?
Color theory is the psychological idea that certain colors and color schemes have the ability to affect our mood. When this information is used to select colors for a website or other digital content, web and graphic designers take advantage of the associations our minds make with certain colors to subconsciously alter viewers’ thoughts about the product or brand being marketed.
Color theory digs deeper into consumers’ preferences for certain colors and looks at the various emotions and personality traits that consumers tend to associate with products of specific colors. Having a solid understanding of the moods and feelings that can be associated with certain colors is an effective way for brands to select colors that subconsciously convey the feelings they would like consumers to have about certain products.
Fresh First
Fresh First is a gluten-free restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Like many specialty restaurants, the brand focuses on marketing toward a specific target audience, rather than the general population. The restaurant primarily targets individuals who enjoy searching for healthier options than the high-calorie meals that are found at average restaurants.
With this idea in mind, Fresh First designed its website to draw viewers’ attention to the bright colors of the fruits and vegetables that make up many of its menu items. Much of the website consists of colorful, natural foods that are placed on a simple gray or white background. Many nutrition experts recommend eating fruits and vegetables of a variety of colors, and this web design choice allows the foods to “pop” from the background and show off the restaurant’s nutritious options much more than they would on a colored background. The site also uses minimal green and orange accents, which blend in with the foods nicely to avoid distracting the viewer.
South Florida Sinus & Allergy Center
South Florida Sinus & Allergy Center’s website utilizes deep blue and gold accent text against a clean, white background. Like many medical practices, South Florida Sinus & Allergy Center has strategically selected colors that can help to calm their patients and reduce anxiety. Blue, a color that is typically associated with stability and safety, is a common choice among medical professionals across a variety of fields. Because it can convey a sense of safety, blue branding can also help increase patients’ trust in their medical professionals.
Using a minimal amount of color on a simple background increases the professional appearance of the site over using too much color, and the clean appearance of the white background can also help viewers feel more secure than colors that invoke strong feelings. The site also uses one simple, sans serif font, which creates a website that is neater and easier to read than using several different types of fonts.
Ball Cap Liner
Ball Cap Liner is an innovative company that provides head protection gear for baseball and softball pitchers. Although batters and umpires typically wear head, face, and mouth protection, the safety of the pitcher is often overlooked. Ball Cap Liner’s products protect pitchers from balls that may be hit directly back toward them.
Ball Cap Liner’s website features sleek, modern color choices based on color theory that support the brand’s position as a leader in new safety equipment for athletes. The site utilizes bold, red accents that grab the viewer’s attention, and many headings are typed in bold capital letters. These web design choices help to create a larger impact than pale colors and simple fonts, and they fit the intense tone that is conveyed by many other athletic brands.
The site’s moving graphic elements and dark, blurred photos of baseball and softball players in the background set a casual, yet professional, tone that is a good fit for the brand’s target audience of elite athletes. The shades of gray that are used in the background create a more modern look than using a solid white background would.
EDSA
EDSA is an architecture and landscape design company that plans buildings, amusement parks, and other properties that work well with nearby natural features. Modern buildings that are near oceans, mountains, and other elements of nature can be designed to complement the beauty of these resources, rather than work against them.
EDSA’s website makes use of the color blue in a different way than South Florida Sinus & Allergy Center’s. The site engages readers by using blue accent text, which blends well with the images of lakes and oceans that are featured. Many of the images on the site move, which is a modern web design decision that showcases more of EDSA’s creations than still photographs can. This web design choice, which is similar to our own, appeals to an audience that constantly pushes the limits to find the most modern trends in their chosen fields.
Effective web design starts with choosing the right colors. Designing your brand’s new website using colors that carry subconscious psychological benefits can be a simple way to help the members of your target audience see your brand the way you want them to. At C&I Studios, we value creating websites that capture our clients’ unique personalities. Visit our website to read more about how we integrate color theory, fonts, and other graphic design elements to match your desired tone or contact us to learn about how we can help you create a top-notch website!