Purple:

Purple is a special color, it is the mixture of red and blue. Since purple is not the basic color, so purple landscape is relatively rare in nature; but it doesn’t mean purple is inferior to any color in the world. On the contrary, purple landscape is something we treasure most. The most heart-beating purple landscape is lavender. Provence’s lavender is one of the top travel destinations for all tourists. Just imagine, you are a noble princess surrounded by vast land of purple flowers in a lavender garden, is that something we only heard about in fairytale? So purple gives the meanings of noble, elegant, rare, mystery and dream. Therefore, it is a color especially suitable for women, that’s why many websites with female users choose purple as the main color.

Lovebeingwoman is a website provides products and services for females. They committed to make women feel confident in and out of the bedroom. What they trying to say is the things they provide can make women beautiful, attractive and special, so from that perspective, it is wise to choose purple as the main color for their website. On the one hand, purple is the favorite color for so many women, on the other, it represents the exact meanings they want to express. The whole page is purple in background, which sending the message of noble and dignity; the decorating flower is perfectly matched with the text in logo and banner.

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After purple, we are going to talk about its complementary color – yellow. Like red or gold, yellow is another warm color. Nature blessed us with gorgeous yellow sceneries, the wonderful sunset, the beautiful flowers, or the fall leaves. So yellow often considered as a happy and hoping color, it indicates bright, sun, happy and hope.

Whereas in web design, yellow is not easy to master. Websites in yellow are not as common as other colors; the reason is that yellow is a highly visual attack color; the brightness of yellow brings discomfort to eyes, especially when it combines with another bright color. That’s why it is frequently used in healthy, safe and danger signals. So how to balance the color’s shock with the website’s effect becomes the key factor that determines the success of a yellow website.

Fontshop is an example that successfully adopts yellow in website. There are 2 skills to solve the above problem in web design: 1. Reduce the brightness of yellow. 2. Combine with dark colors. Fontshop did the both 2 skills. The result of reducing brightness is that it is not visually aggressive, but gentle and soft which indicates the natural and positive meanings of hope. Yellow is a really good accompany for black, which lighten up the whole web design. The combination with black brings the sense of modern and hi-tech.

White:

Nature express white in different forms: snow, ice, water and flower. You are going to take a deep breath when you standing on the top of the snow mountain; your mind will be purified if you had a chance stepping on the ice field of Antarctic. So white represents clean, simple, pure, naïve and divine.

Design2markup has great inspiration of choosing white, or specifically, an inspiring treatment of black and white. Black and white is the classical combination. The whole page has not any extra complicated elements, which makes it clean and clear. The feel only displayed by color itself. Visitors can easily get the information they want.

Black:

Like you have guessed, I choose black as the last color for this post. When you look upon into the dark sky in midnight, have you ever wondered how many stars are there in the boundless universe? Black in nature often refers to night or universe. So it makes us feel like high, deep, solemn, solid, serious or modern.

Black can match with almost every color in web design, even the dark ones. It makes them look brighter and gives the sense of modern and scientific. Versions is a very good example of choosing black as the main color for their website. There is a gradient in background from dark blue to black, which brings mysterious feeling that makes visitors want to explore. It serves as a foil to brighten up the green logo in the middle that makes it superstar of the page.

It is a successful work that illustrates the relationship between background color (or say bottom color) and object color. We are going to encounter with the situation of using different colors for elements that shape the whole page. As the background color (or bottom color), we tend to push it away; and as the object color (colors for image or text), we tend to draw it near in comparison. Generally speaking, compare to the dark ones, the bright and light colors are easier to create object effect. Therefore, you are going to analyze the relation between the colors you want to use. In this example, the meanings of natural black play a very important role of making whole page boundless and far away; and more importantly, it makes the object (the green logo) bright and impressive.

Conclusion:

Color is the gift of nature, and soul of website. Choosing color is a kind of art. Before adopting any color to website, you need to understand their meaning and find the best color that matches your purpose. It’s just like you give birth to your website.

In web design community, color is one of the key factors that determine the success of website. A website of extraordinary color combination leaves people an unforgettable memory that makes them visit again and again; a website of worse color makes people don’t want to see it for the rest of life.

Today, I pick up 4 websites with excellent color inspiration from nature that successfully demonstrate their features.

Red:

Red is one of the three basic colors in the world. We are blessed by countless red scenery from Mother Nature, the flourishing flower, the maple leaves; they bring shocking visual experience to our life. So psychologically, red conveys rich meanings. It symbolizes enthusiasm, happy, flourish, boom and etc. In addition, red also has derivative meanings on the other side. Animals who want to express the meaning of warning or stop, they use bright colors, and red is the most common one. It contains the meaning of stop and warning. We can see the birds or snakes warn their enemies with red.

Women’s Refugee Commission is an excellent example of adopting red from nature and combine color with their own features. Since they provide care, love and protection to refugee women, red is the most suitable color for their action and goal. It suggest the information of refugee will disappear as long as all of us provide love and care to them, and future will be like flourishing tulips. On the other hand, red also bring people’s attention of stop ignoring their pain.

They choose bright red in the middle and dark one on the sides. It is a wise idea to express the both information, and meanwhile, avoid monotone which increases the sense of hierarchy. A nice practice of color balance.

Blue:

When we talk about blue, the instinct reflection is water. All earth lives were derived from the ocean; thanks to H2O that give birth to all lives in universe. I believe no one could say no to embrace the blue ocean. As a matter of fact, that is somewhere we belong to. We can live for 7 days without food, but only 3 days life without water. So blue conveys the meaning of life, hope, peace, safe and etc. on the other hand, blue also give the negative information of grief or lonely. Have you ever cried for that dark blue of North Atlantic in Titanic?

Knight Liquidity is a perfect example that combines their business with nature blue. The first massage of first sight on Knight is simple and clear – water. This company has something to do with water. Specifically, they provide water solution in the places like Ethiopia, Haiti and India. They are committed to bring clean, safe water to the people in the above places. So blue is a right color for their business, it indicates that they are going to bring life and healthy to those places. The whole webpage is dominated by blue, but with gradient effect; so it is comfortable in visual. As the dividing line, the water plays a delicate role in divide the logo and content, which brings vivid and dynamic to the whole page.

Green is another basic color in nature. We are surrounded by green every time we resting in the garden, lying on the grassland or exploring in the forest. It is the color we like most in a rapid developing world; we advocate green way of life, green environment, green resources and etc. So green means fresh, growth, clean and new.

Green Infrastructure Inc is a nice example of choosing green to their website. They naturally present their business in a right color. It is a newly formed non-profit organization established to research alternative renewable energy sources that are sustainable and environmentally friendly. What they are doing is environmentally protective, which is clean and fresh. Undoubtedly, green will be the No. 1 choice for their website color. The whole page is green, which leaves people a brief and fresh impression. The menu contains the information they want to provide, so the menu color is a little bit darker compare to the background, and each menu is going to change even darker when the mouse moves to there. Therefore, it is convenient for people to find the core information of this webpage. As people get to understand them, green is automatically connected to their business. At this time, color is playing the role of sending massage that they are clean, fresh and protective – the exact result they want to have.

Golden:

Golden is a beautiful color in nature. When you walk in the wheat field or sunflower garden, you are touched by that vast golden stretching to the horizon. So we consider golden as rich, harvest and mature.

Truskawka is an outstanding golden website. Since I don’t understand the language used by this website, I can’t tell you exactly what is it all about; but fortunately, it helps me to build direct connection to the website’s information without any interference. At the first sight of this webpage, it is like a kind of visual shock to me, the golden gives me the sense of warm and harvest. After seeing those fruit pictures, I guess it is a farm website that selling various kinds of fruits. But from my perspective, they must have lots of fruits and it must be a harvest year. I think this feeling is brought by golden. If we change the background to black or any other color, I may not have that feeling.

The whole webpage only adopt one color, but different in depth, so it doesn’t seem like mechanical. It proves that one color is also suitable for web design, but need to be treated with difference in depth and effect.

Conclusion:

Color is the gift of nature, and soul of website. Choosing color is a kind of art. Before adopting any color to website, you need to understand their meaning and find the best color that matches your purpose. It’s just like you give birth to your website.