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When designing your site, I recommend finding a colour palette that you feel works and then sticking with it. Don’t try and mix colors from different colour palettes because it’s likely the colours will not blend as well as you’re imagining. This may cause your logo or site to look disjointed. For a palette to work well in a web site design there should be some type of commonality. What ties your colours together?

Keep in mind that the human eye requires contrasts to be able to read something clearly. Don’t pick web design colours that will be hard to read when placed together. For example, dark text on a dark background probably will not work. Try opting for a light background and dark text, or a dark background and light text. The difference in tones will visually interest your audience and make them want to focus in to read your text.

I’ve not been around lately (well not in Blogland anyway!) I’ve been really busy, I’m currently doing a website for the Arches club in Glasgow! Should be with us really soon….

Anyhoo, my website design has made it to both top css galleries: Screenalicious and CSS Heaven

Check them out for yourself and then click through to my site (boost the old google ratings!)

After months of re-designs and submissions, 5th C has finally made it to the web design gallery site, One Pixel Army! (see link below)

Now to get submission to other gallery sites…

View my listing

You know what colours you like, but do you know what your favourite colours mean? You may want to brush up on the hidden meaning behind colours before designing your company material.

• Blue — Blue is currently the most popular colour for companies to use in their branding strategies. It represents calmness, hope and stability. Research says that people are more likely to trust information coming from sites that are blue and to pay attention to blue logos.
• Red — Numerous studies have claimed that people working in red rooms work faster. Why? Because the colour red is said to increase blood pressure and heart rate. That might be perfect if you’re trying to work your employees to death, but if you’re trying to attract customers, moderate your use of this powerful colour.
• Yellow — Used in small amounts, yellow is inviting, sunshine, cheerful and the number one attention getter. However, it has conflicting symbolism. To some it denotes happiness and joy, and to others it symbolises cowardice and deceit. Research what this colour means to your target audience before plastering it all over your site.
• Green — Green means go. It is associated with movement, nature and fertility. It symbolises growth, freshness and safety. Darker shades of green are often associated with money and wealth. It is the most restful colour for the human eye.
• Orange — As many ‘on sale’ products have orange stickers attached to them, people have come to associate this colour with affordability. Bright orange is hard for the eyes to process and is not recommended as a background colour for your site, though it can be very effective for logos. Small amounts of orange can help create a ‘fun’ atmosphere, so use it sparingly.
• Purple — Purple is associated with royalty. It symbolises luxury, power, wisdom and ambition. Lighter shades of this colour are said to evoke romantic and nostalgic feelings.
• Black — Considered the negation of colour, black is conservative. It can be serious and conventional or mysterious and sophisticated.
• White — The colour white is associated with innocence, purity and goodness. From a marketing perspective, white often denotes cleanliness.

Having recently had some great excuses to scour the internet looking for inspiration for new projects, I have been shocked to discover a complete lack of  colour awarness in a considerably high number of websites. Get this sorted folks, its not hard. If in doubt get others opinions, you can’t all be wrong!

Over the next few posts I wanted write a bit about the use of colour when designing your websites.

Using Colour in Web Design

Your logo and site are more than just a collection of text, images and white space. Somewhere in there are the colours you choose. It may seem trivial, but the colours you select to represent your company will influence your audiences’ perception of you and will determine if they stick around to investigate further. How much time would you spend on a site that’s background came up in bright yellow? You probably wouldn’t even wait for the images to load. Why? Because even in small doses, it is the harshest colour on the eyes, and is likely to send you running for cover.

People use colour to categorise objects in their everyday lives. Green for go, red for warning etc. Therefore, it’s only logical that your customers are using your colours to gather important information about your company. Similarly, many companies use colour in their web design to help users identify and categorise their brand with just one glance. In fact, for some companies, the colour in their logo is the basis for their entire branding strategy (think IBM Blue).

Use it wisely!

The Highland Fling was a great success this year, all the speakers had lots to share and made for a really interesting seminar! A lot of what said was about re-thinking the web and improving how we do things as compared to going over old ground fixing and updating problems. The term is defined as progressive enhancememt.

I’m going to put a lot of the new techniques and thoughts to the test on my website and hopefully end up with a better result than when I sarted. Thats the plan anyway!

CSS3 seems to be a little bit of a sticking point however. All the modules the css3 working group are promising look great but for some reason are digging their heels in and aren’t making any progress with development. I also found out that some of the bigger companies (Hewlett Packard, SUN) have paid a lot of money to represent themselves in the working group and its this that seems to be setting the agenda for development. This is crazy! Developers, the real users of CSS, should be making the demands and pushing forward what is really needed, not some rich fat cat!!

Speakers

Jeremy Keith - Clear Left
What is progressive enhancement?

Mark Norman Francis - Yahoo Europe
Graded browser support

Andy Budd - Clear Left
The Future of CSS

Christian Heilmann - Yahoo Europe
Progressive enhancement using Javascript and AJAX

James Edwards - Brothercake
What has AJAX done for us anyway?

Drew McLellan - All in the Head
Microformats: Can your website be your API?

Andy Clarke - Stuff and Nonsense
Beyond progressive enhancement

The Highland Fling 2007: An annual one-day conference in Scotland aimed at web developers and businesses with an interest in web standards and accessibility.

That’s me! That’s what i do!

I’m off to the Highland Fling Conference on Thursday and will hopefully learn new and wonderful things about what’s hot and what’s not in web standards and accessibilty. Shaaawing!!

There has been talk of everyone wearing their kilts but it could be one of those things where you turn up in one and no-one else does…”Taxi for the big man!”

Kilt or not, I’m really looking forward to it in a geeky way. Not that I’m a self confessed geek, just that I might be perceived as one when I’m skipping down to the train station on Thursday morning! (Well it is a day off work after all!!)

I’ve included a link to the website, have a look and tell me what you think about the “moody” profile pictures of the speakers. I think these guys think they’re the celebs of the web world!! Maybe they are?

Anyway, since my posts are getting more sporadic, I suppose my next one will be reporting on how good the conference actually was. Watch this space…

I know I’ve been absent of late but I’ve been busy working! You’ll hear no complaints from me.

Moreover, I’ve just secured another job for an existing client in Edinburgh. My client requires a website for her proofreading business. I’m sure I could do with her help!

The Edinburgh Proofreader website will be online immanently! I have to say its a pleasure working with someone who finds writing for the web a breeze! Not the easiest thing to do, the content gathering process has always been a sticking point for a lot of my jobs. However, I have a feeling this job will run a lot more smoothly and will leave me with more time to concentrate on the design and layout.

Eager to break away from the usual Monday night, soap night regime, we made the journey down to the chocolate box village of Melrose last night and met with professional wedding co-ordinator Lindsey Hunter.

Yes, I know, we’re already married but this was for a different reason… 

Lindsey is very interested in working with Just Proposed allowing her to offer a very unique type of wedding package for her clients. Lindsey, and her company Get Knotted, work exclusively for Mellerstain and Hoscote, two of the most stunning wedding venues in Scotland.

We discussed different options and the best way to take things forward over a very nice meal in the Townhouse Brasserie.

It was evident that both ourselves and Lindsey are extremely driven in our business quest and hopefully, very soon, we can begin working together and bring weddings up-to-date and into the 21st Century!!

This is a handy tool for all you map lovers! I think we’ve all seen and heard about Google Earth, and we all agree what an amazing tool it actually is. Well, I think Flash Earth goes one better. It’s based on the same idea and even uses the google maps database. However, the beauty of this is that it also uses the Microsoft maps db and other map associated sites too. Essentially your getting the best of all worlds!

In search of Lake Garda

We’re heading off to Lake Garda later this year and after searching Google Earth for the area we’ll be staying, I was disappointed to find it hasn’t been covered in great detail with Google Earth (yet!). However, simply flicking from Google maps to Microsoft maps in Flash Earth, I was happy to find a better map that I could zoom into, giving me the information I was looking for.

URL: http://www.flashearth.com/

I still don’t favour Microsoft products though!