Tag Archive for 'colors'

Tips on Designing Effective Website Layout

Published
by
LimeExchange
on September 16, 2009
in Freelance and Freelancing
. 6 Comments

Your website layout plays an important role to attract more visitors to your website. A good layout is something that addresses the customer’s needs effectively, pleases search engine crawlers and is designed in compliance with the latest trends of the business.

To design a user & search engine friendly web layout, avoid use of rustic colors, clumsy navigation, overstuffed links and heavy images. Here are a few basic guidelines that can help in coming up with a neat and clean layout.

Give Ample Room To White Space

Don’t flood your audiences with too much information or images. Skip those flashing graphics and try using lots of white space so that the website appears neat and clean. Don’t use long stories and content to convey information about your products and services. Web visitors hate reading!

Avoid Using Heavy Files/graphics

Don’t upload large files and graphics on your web pages since it would increase downloading time of the pages manifold and your potential client might get irritated. Also, it must be kept in mind that visitors will see your website in multiple screen resolutions so the images used must be eye catching as well as optimized in terms of resolution and size.

Color Combination

The color combination and images used in your website should be refreshingly new as that would make them feel intrigued to browse through the multiple pages of your site. Go for the color combination that adequately conveys your brand message and looks aesthetically pleasing.

Easy Navigation

The navigation menu should be consistent throughout all pages of your website and the links must be properly positioned to avoid ambiguity and that the users find the links easily and navigate through the pages of your website.

Readable Fonts

Choose simple fonts that can easily be deciphered by your potential customers. Be consistent with your font type and font size as it makes the content readable for the target audiences.

Follow Consistency

Be consistent with everything on the web pages ranging from font size & type to navigation menus, size of headings. Ensure that all pages of your website have the consistent look-n-feel. The primary design element must be same throughout all the web pages.

Designing / redesigning a website layout is certainly not an easy task but an extremely important one if you want to be successful on the World Wide Web. We hope that you liked our post and welcome your feedback and insights on the same.

10 Useful Tools for Choosing the Right Color Palette

Published
by
LimeExchange
on August 25, 2009
in Technology
. 1 Comment

Colors communicate website themes, design and its main objective. Plus, they also have the ability to create a positive effect on the visitor and entice them to revisit the site. Psychologists have also discovered that over 60% of approval/rejection of a design/website is dependent on this fact as people are subconsciously inclined more towards color impressions. Hence, it is important to choose the right color palette when you are working on a web design project.

Here is a list of some useful color palette resources to generate color palettes, schemes and themes for your design work.

Colorlovers


There are currently 234,060 users  sharing 2,161,472 colors in 935,479 palettes to create their special design projects. It is a resource to choose a color for your ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification. It is a place to check out variety of colors, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews. You can build your network by participating in discussion forum.

ColoRotate

With this color palette tool, you can work with colors in 3D, you can quickly see the multidimensional nature of your colors. It enables you to change your color one at a time, blend two different colors together and also transform a complete palette of colors at the same time with contrast and color. You can use its quick drag-and-drop feature to adjust hue, brightness, and saturation. It also enables you to import and export several formats, load from an image, or preview colorblindness. You can post your palettes, and tag palettes to engage with the community, or discussions.

Kuler

This is a community driven web application by Adobe, which lets you browse through thousands of color themes created by the Kuler community. You can search by tag word, title, creator, or hex color. It allows you to create your own by using the color wheel, harmony rules, and color sliders. You can also share and comment on different palettes and receive feedback on your own creations. The tool offers great features, and you can even download its desktop version.

ColorExplorer

This is a powerful color picker tool that that will help you choose the colors of your website or design projects. It enables you to drop color;  adjust brightness; adjust RGB ; autotag; import image palette ; Websafe colors; colornames; import scales; randomize; stay-on-top mode, and more. It supports HTML, VB, Java, and many other formats. Its Websafe feature ensures that the colors you pick will be rendered properly in most of the browsers, though it does depend on the user having at least 256 colors available.

Colors Palette Generator


The Colors Palette Generator by CSSdrive is a useful tool to easily create a color palette from an image. You can get the images to create a color palette either from your own computer, or from any URL. You can easily upload an image to generate a color palette based on the image’s primary colors. You can upload a file up to 1 MB. It supports variety of image types such as .png, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg etc.

Toucan

This creativity tool allows you to choose up to 20 colors per palette using color association rules or an uploaded image. This tool can be used alone or in conjunction with other creation tools by aviary. It also provides you an opportunity to learn and share with the community; you can  learn new skills from the tutorials available.

Colorschemedesigner


This tool ensures accuracy with color space conversions, better preview, enhanced scheme creation system, unique scheme IDs and permanent URL of the scheme. It allows you to edit each color shade in the palette. It has also added Instant Designer Shop to get hi-quality professional logos, templates, designs and services for instant use.

Colorwizard


This application lets you match colors to create great looking designs. It allows you to submit your own base color, returns a set of hue, saturation and shade variations of your color. It also suggests color schemes based on complementary color, split complementary colors, analogous colors and other variations. It also has a randomize function that lets you generate unique color schemes for your project.

ColorHunter


This application allows you to explore and generate color palettes from images. You can search images used in the process of generating a color palette from Flickr using relevant search term. You can also upload photos and get a color palette based on the colors from your image.

Genopal


This color palette tool has two Free online tools to help you in generating color schemes, you can extract colors from an image, or you can also create your own color scheme. It lets you explore a much larger set of color possibilities and work seamlessly with other 2D/3D and Web Design programs.

Hope these tools will help you in selecting the right color palette for your design project. Please provide us with your valuable suggestions and feedback as always.

Choosing Right Colors for Designing a Corporate Website

Published
by
LimeExchange
on August 19, 2009
in Freelance, Freelancing, LimeExchange and Small and Medium Business
. 1 Comment

Right and apt usage of colors while designing a website is a crucial decision every web designer has to take. A website is not only a cluster of web pages, it actually represents a company, owner, employees and products. It requires a lot of understanding of the business before designing the website as that may already has an established color scheme. However, color scheme is one of the most significant factors as it can impact the company’s branding and positioning in the market.


Here are a few considerations all designers must keep in mind before designing a corporate website.

1. Use natural colors

Natural colors are more pleasing and give a soothing effect to your website. You can make a good combination of light colors like white, grey, yellow etc. to make your website visually enticing. Avoid using unnatural colors as they usually strain visitors eyes.

2. Text color contrasts with background color

This definitely impacts the readability of the content of the website. You can use the standard black text color on white background or other effective colors such as dark blue, gray and black. You are free to use as much colors as you want, as long as it doesn’t take away the contrast of the text.

3. Be consistent

A consistent color theme throughout the website allows the user to feel more at ease and in control of their navigation. Also to reinforce the brand recognition and for earning familiarity amongst the visitors, consistent layout and design is a must. You can select an average of three colors to maintain the consistency throughout the website.

4.Colors and emotions

Different colors have different meanings and emotions. They express happiness, sadness, anger, comfort, trust, anxiety etc. You can spend some time researching on different colors considering the mood you want to create and the audience you are designing for. A few common colors and their meanings:

Red -Energy, cheerfulness, courage, power, determination
Yellow- Intelligence, happiness, energy, enthusiasm, confidence, humour, dreams, creativity.
Green -Money, success, youth, stability, freshness, nature, tranquil, sharing, friendliness.
Orange -friendliness, warmth, approachability, energy, playfulness, courage.
Blue- wisdom, sophistication, celebration.
White- purity, cleanliness, youth, freshness, peace.
Black- power, elegance, secrecy, mystery.
Gray- security, maturity, reliability.

5.The recall value

Prospects and customers usually associate a brand with its colors. Even for a small business, choosing the right color and its association with the brand should be considered. Once a brand has been established, visitors will have certain expectations from the website as well, hence, it is important for a designer to use the same colors or similar colors used in branding or in marketing collaterals of that particular company.

There are many tools available on the Internet that help in selecting the best color combination for designing a website. These tools allow you to choose different set of colors that best suit your needs on different criteria like rating, positive comments or even the names of those combinations. These resources will help you apply same set of colors to your favorite website by detecting the hues employed with their corresponding programming code. They enable you to check out a variety of colors irrespective of the purpose, be it for business promotion, ad campaigns, product design or architectural design. You can compare palettes, submit news and comments or read articles and interviews. Some of the resources, which provide these services like Adobe Kuler, Colorlovers, Colorjack, I Like Your Colors, Color Palette Generator etc.

Hope these considerations would help you in selecting right colors for designing a corporate website. We welcome your feedback and suggestions as always.