Your Company Identity
Choose color palettes that reflect your company identity. If you want your audience to remember your brand, select a palette that helps your audience recognize your brand at a glance. For example, Coca-Cola is known for using red, FedEx for orange and purple, and National Geographic for yellow and black. Click here for a great reference on the colors that famous companies use.
Emotion and Mood
When an audience visits your website, what feeling do you want to convey? Trust? Approachability? Love? The color you choose sets your mood.
Maintain Consistency
Color consistency throughout a website is typically a good design idea. Avoid drastic color/tone changes from page to page. The site should flow.
Color Palette Resources
Need inspiration? Here is a nice article on color palettes.
Color Feedback
Share the color palette with your team. Get feedback. But remember that opinions are like bellybuttons…everyone has one!
Selecting Fonts for Websites
Typography
Typography is an essential element of any website. The font you chose gives a vibe to your site and your business. Take time to select a font family that conveys a balanced style and tone.
Your Branded Font
Your font choice represents your brand and identity. Modern? Traditional? Historic? Playful? Be sure that the emotion in your font matches your business. Most importantly, be sure your font is readable at different sizes. Look at it on a mobile phone to be sure. It should scale well and be readable from as small as 10pt. The space between sentences is called leading. If it’s too tight, it’s tough to read. If it’s too wide, it wastes space and requires too much scrolling. Here is a great blog post about leading and its cousins, kerning, and tracking.
Fonts Resources
Click here is Google’s Fonts resource page. You can type in your company name or a sample sentence to see it rendered instantly in numerous font families. We suggest you stick to two fonts per website. Serif or San Serif fonts are best for most websites. Handwritten and cursive fonts are often hard to read and just plain weird.
Font Feedback
Share your font choice with your team. When you’re close to a project, sometimes it’s hard to be objective. Get feedback and consider it.
In Conclusion
Details matter. While it may seem unimportant, small design details make a huge impact on our psyche.
When we at DevineDesign create websites, this part of the process can take hours… and even days. That’s OK; the important thing is to get it right. So take the time to stop, look, and feel your website components of colors and fonts.
