Remember the color wheel from elementary school? The warm colors are on the yellow and red side of the wheel. They are highly emotional colors and often perceived as colors to stimulate energy or excitement.
On the other side of the wheel are the cool colors. Blue and green tones are more soothing and calming than the warm colors and evoke softer emotions.
When you hear the words “Stop” and “Go”, do you naturally think of the colors red and green respectively? I do. Certain colors and color palettes are branded to commercial enterprises and companies spend millions of dollars annually ensuring the protection of brands, logos, and colors. For example, think of McDonald’s restaurants (yellow), Starbucks (green) and Coca-Cola (red) as companies that have invested consistently in color as a part of their branding strategy.
Let’s get started on colors for YOUR blog. To begin, choose one or two colors that will be the core selections. These will appear in images, fonts, and even header and footer bars to give a consistent color palette across the site. Think about how you will use these colors.
Choosing Your Color Palette
Color Wheel Pro
Color Wheel Pro is the first stop. This site gives insightful perspectives on color choices and explains the emotional responses typical for certain color selections.
Excerpts from Color Wheel Pro website:
Red is the color of fire and blood, so it is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power, determination as well as passion, desire, and love.
Yellow produces a warming effect, arouses cheerfulness, stimulates mental activity, and generates muscle energy. Yellow is often associated with food. Bright, pure yellow is an attention getter, which is the reason taxicabs are painted this color.
Purple combines the stability of blue and the energy of red. Purple is associated with royalty. It symbolizes power, nobility, luxury, and ambition. It conveys wealth and extravagance.
Color Wheel Pro is one of my favorite color sites because it clearly explains emotional reactions to tones and shades of a color.
Dark green is associated with ambition, greed, and jealousy.
Aqua is associated with emotional healing and protection.
Olive green is the traditional color of peace.
Color Wheel Pro offers a software program for $39.95. This program will help you with sample color schemes to choose additional colors to compliment your primary color choice. (I have always used the free online tools).
Paletton
Paletton is the website that I used for this blog. I chose the turquoise/greenish color as my primary color and then used Paletton to see variations and complementary colors. I settled on four colors – turquoise, rose pink, bright green, and a mellow softened orange. When you are using the website, notice the small tab for “Examples” (bottom right corner of the screen). Click to see color choices in a website mockup and some background variations. Paletton has sharing buttons to ask for social media feedback on your choices, or just to email the decision choices to yourself as a reference file.
When you have decided on a color scheme, use the Paletton tools to generate the hex codes and RGB color numbers. The hex code will be six characters – a combination of letters and numbers and will sometimes have a hashtag in front – like this…#45D9C1 or #fba6c2. The RGB color (representing red, green and blue) is always a set of numbers indicating the mix of red, green and blue. For example, the aqua blue on this site is RGB code 69-217-193.
These codes will become part of your overall blog style guide and will be referenced often – some system color inputs will be hex codes and others will be the RGB numbers. You will need both types of codes.
I chose an aqua green tone for this blog because it is (for me) a favorite color. This blog is a place of my favorite things – where I can write freely and openly while helping my friends. It is my hope that readers feel safe in this environment and gain financial healing as one of many benefits (and joys) of side gig and part-time income.
Coolors
Coolors is another recommended website. With this online program, simply upload a favorite image and create a palette of the colors in that image. Fun times, right? Coolors offers an app for Android or iOs smartphones, along with plugins for Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.
Colorhex.com
Another fun site, colorhex.com is my go-to site for looking up RGB codes when I already have the Hex code. I store both of these codes (Hex and RGB) on my blog style sheet to reference in several different programs that I use for my blog images. As a bonus, the Colorhex website provides CSS codes for adding a particular color into your blog. Copy. Paste. Easy!
Copy. Paste. Easy!
The folks at ColorPalettes.Net do the heavy lifting for you. On this site, you can see a variety of color combinations and simply choose the already-designed color palette that appeals most to you. Need more? Check out this article from Elegant Themes. Happy to see that some of my all-time favorites are on their list!
Summary
As you can see, color is important to a positive blog experience – for you as the writer and more importantly for your readers. Choose the color palette that works for your blog and then, most importantly, stick with those colors! Yes, you can make changes if necessary, but as your blog grows, it will be very time consuming to rework the backdated posts and adjust all of the images. Start with a good foundation of very few colors, using these helpful tools and resources.
Learn more about color selection and blogging in my “Related Posts” at the bottom of this page.
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