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Color has a serious impact on how visitors perceive your site.
Whether you’re a designer or the owner of a new WordPress site, there are a few things you need to know about using color.
How do you pick a great color palette for your site?
There are rules and tactics you can follow to make more educated decisions on your color choices that will lead to better, more harmonious designs.
Here are 7 tutorials that will help you pick better color schemes, learn color symbolism, and better understand color psychology.
1. Color Theory
This is an awesome introduction for anyone who isn’t a web designer. As a resource made by Canva, this tutorial is aimed at your average blogger or webmaster looking to better utilize color on their site.
If you’re new to color theory and just want one resource to check out, make it this one.
2. Four Quick Tips for Improving Color Harmony
This is a fast read and a great resource for anyone who wants to pick colors that just work well together. There are plenty of tools for picking out color schemes, but it can be a more creative and fruitful process to simply follow a few guidelines and let a scheme come to you instead.
3. The fundamentals of understanding color theory
This article by 99designs gets a bit more technical and covers some topics like color schemes and how to use complementary, analogous, and triadic color combinations. It’s a good read if you’re looking to take your understanding of color a bit deeper.
4. Color Symbolism and Culture
This guide will help you pick a color that matches the message of the project you’re working on. It’s not that in-depth but will provide you with an overview of color symbolism and color meaning. The emphasis on symbolization and how colors make people feel brings a whole new life to the understanding of color.
5. The Psychology of Color
This one isn’t a tutorial it’s actually an infographic, but it’s a great overview of how different colors affect our moods and perception.
If you’re looking for a deeper exploration into the meaning of color so you can more precisely choose colors that communicate the right feelings, check out Color Messages & Meanings.
6. How to Choose a Colour Theme
This post is really actionable and useful. It isn’t a step-by-step tutorial, but more of a checklist of things to check when selecting the right colors or finding inspiration for your next project.
If you’re like me and you sometimes struggle with creating nice palettes, you can cheat by finding an existing palette on Colour Lovers.
7. The 28 Best Tools for Choosing a Colour Scheme
One you have an idea of the colors you’re going to use, you’ll want to get them just right. Is that orange too bright? Is that blue too saturated?
This huge list of tools will help you pick exactly the colors you’re imagining for your project (or discover new ones).
Conclusion
Even if you know nothing about color theory, reading the 7 posts above will give you a pretty strong foundation to work with. You may not be an expert, but you’ll certainly be capable of choosing a meaningful brand color and putting together a nice palette for your site.
Do you have any other tools for picking color schemes or tutorials on color theory to add? Leave a comment below!
