Kaitlyn Lehman's Profile

The best way to communicate clearly with color is to limit your use of colors.

Too many colors can be distracting, confusing, reduce focus, and look childish.

Generally around 4 colors is a good idea.

With four colors you can have a background color, a main design color, and then two contrasting or highlighting colors.

If possible, try to integrate the images into your color palette.

If you have several images with many colors, consider this when creating your site color palette. Try to match key images with the palette and consider a more limited color palette for the site—maybe 3 or even 2 colors instead. This will make the images “pop” more and create less color clutter on the site.

You must select colors with good contrasts, especially for any colors that will be used for text.

body text, should contrast with the background it is on for readability and legibility.

Another good choice, if your users are not blue-yellow colorblind, is dark blue on white. Dark grey on white is also good.

Generally you want your text to be darker and your background lighter.

The first is low contrast.

Low contrast is simply hard to read. It can cause the readers discomfort and eye strain. It actually hurts my eye to try to read it.

The second thing to avoid is combining bold vibrant colors, either with each other or with some dark colors.

Once you have a color palette for your site, turn it into a color scheme.

Use color to code information your site.

If you are using a limited color scheme you may have several types of information in a single color.

Do use color to emphasize these different pieces of information and consider what needs emphasis.

However, do not rely just on color for coding information. Different types of information need to be visually different and color is just one way, and a good one way, to do that.

make sure you provide a secondary cue, such as size, bold or italics, white space, shape, or something besides color to also visually differentiate the type of information.

The most important thing here is to be consistent. Choose a color for a type of information make sure you apply that color each time you provide that piece of information.

Do not use colors as the only way you code information—also use bold, italics, size, white space, shapes and other methods to distinguish pieces of information—say headings from body text.

Use high contrast in your designs, as color alone may not be enough for color blind users to distinguish the differences.