Fynmark.org beyond everything

Progressive Designs: Out with Color

What?! Out with color? You want boring designs?!

No. Bear with me and I'll explain. People like you should really not jump to conclusions. Here I'll be discussing how designs have been moving towards simplicity, minimalism, and more white-space.

The Colorful Designs

People enjoy colors, so designers naturally use a lot of color. There are some amazing websites out there that use dramatically different colors well, though unfortunately I can't think of any off the top of my head. Way to deliver, right?

But, as with all great things, there's the bad. People have also used bad color combinations or even too much color on a single design, creating a sense of ugliness and making you look like a big ol' novice to a little thing called the rainbow. I can think of many sites that used bad color combo's or too much color, but to save their dignity I'll not list them.

Things like purple and yellow often feel too far away from each other on the color wheel to flow together in perfect harmony. The key to using a lot of color brings us to the other side of designs. But before we travel there to discuss the pros and cons as we've done with very colorful designs, I'd like to salute those designers that use many colors amazingly. For instance, using a rainbow spectrum in what would have been a black and white header image. Those designs do feel great, and that, too, brings us to simplicity, minimalism, and white-space.

The Simplistic Designs

As palettes become more and more important in designs, simplicity has as well. While 1 color may be off, the rest of a design can look great. An example that, in my opinion, is described by the sentence prior is the new Wacom Bamboo Tablets area. You can view it here.

Personally, the background color's too bright, but the body layout's great, and the coloring pretty simplistic. That's what designs should be geared towards to be accepted by most audiences.

The less images, crazy color combos, and generally random or mixed stuff you've got in a design or palette, the cleaner, neater, and more professional it feels. Isn't that what people want in a design - designers and viewers alike?

Thoughts

Before I ever dreamed of designing a web page realistically, I always stayed on simplistic, but clean and neat websites. The gaudier it was without a set theme, the uglier, in my opinion, it was. Since I've designed or even just sketched designs, I've only gone on simpler and neater websites. I actually ignore content on websites with packed colors and images.

In summary, crazy colors + bad images = ugly. Good design + rationed rainbow spectrum or flairy colors = great. Simple design + neat design + good colors and images = great. In summary of summary, good design = more readers that stay.

About Tim

I'm just a regular guy who enjoys writing, web design, and designing anything. Thanks for reading my blog.