It’s a known fact that color can make people happy, sad, anxious or calm, so when it comes time to pick a color palette for your website, it isn’t something to take lightly.

The psychology of color far bigger than can be covered in this short blog post, so instead let me give you the basics of web color and how to use it in all your online endeavors.

As photographers, we are use to working in RGB color and if you done any design for print, you’ve probably worked with it’s equivalent CMYK. Specifying colors for display on the web we use yet a third palette which is called Hexadecimal or HEX for short.

If you open up Photoshop and select the Color Picker, you can see all the different call outs for each palette plus two we won’t be covering here today, HSB and LAB.

The information you are looking for are the letters and numbers at the bottom of the picker which start with the pound symbol # and then are followed by a series of numbers and letters such as C0C0C0.

Web Safe Colors
You may also choose to select the Only Web Colors check box which will force you to pick one of the 216 websafe colors. Websafe colors are limited palette of colors that will display the same across all browsers and platforms. With the sophistication of computers and browses these days this isn’t as much of an issue as it was 10 years ago. so I say leave it unchecked.

A few color tips . . .

• Make sure the colors you use are complimentary to your overall branding.
• Use colors that allow your photography to stand out.
• Keep your color palette to a minimum.
• Use your brightest colors for website accents ONLY
• Remember the colors you choose have the possibility to turn viewers off, so choose your colors with caution.
• Get the opinion of friends and family on the colors you choose. See how they make them feel.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this blog post which will cover some of my favorite color tools.