You can’t always choose what colour scheme you are using. Clients have existing branding that you often have to work with. You might in your eyes see it as not working but you can’t just reject a client on the basis of their colour scheme (not if you want to have clients). The ‘how the heck do I make that work’ is one of those things at some point you are going to utter at a client colour scheme.
My eyes are burning
Not all is lost though as there are many ways you can work within a colour scheme to make it work better. Firstly, don’t go with your ‘argh’ gut reaction and think about the fact that most colours will go if you use hues / tones and choose carefully how you are using them. The first port of call is thinking about using a problem colour as an accent rather than a main feature. After that you can see about using neutral colours to unite the scheme. Using the colour scheme over the site’s design elements is a way you can make the scheme easier to view. Think about using tones of grey, black and white – this could be warm or cold tones. By using neutral colours as a tone you can link in elements. By adding these few simple methods you can balance out the problem scheme.
Spread the clash about
Aside from the colour scheme itself you can think about adding other things into the mix such as photography. By picking an image you can either add contrast so it balances or reduce the impact of the grating scheme. This is something you have to do carefully, a busy colour scheme won’t be made less busy by using a busy image – that just ends up in a whole load of busy. One method that you may not think about is to use a background for the site. Sometimes, by doing this you level out the design and make the stronger elements sit back. A background transparency over a colour can reduce the problem and you could also try using the grating elements in a background to move out of the design itself and divide up the colour scheme. Gradients can also be used subtly to use the scheme colours but in a more suggested manner than blocks of it. You can also look at the layout itself of the design. By using the colours in focal points you can break up the colour scheme that clashes. The biggest one of these is by using whitespace itself, whitespace can easily let the colour scheme breathe and become less glaring.
It’s never ‘that’ bad
As with anything, there is often a way in design. A lot of professional design is about making compromises. Yes, we’d all love to work on projects we only had control of and those ones are the lights at your tunnel ends. More often than not with corporate branding already done you have to work with an existing logo and colour scheme. By using simple design techniques you can reduce the problem this scheme may cause. I’ve done it, we’ve all done it as designers; that time when you proclaim out in toy throwing over a colour scheme. It’s good to remind yourself though that as with any design you will end up doing something for it, even if you do have to bash your head against it for a while. As with any design for a client it’s about getting the best possible result for them and doing the best you can in the constraints, you can just make more room in those constraints with some simple colour swiss army knife techniques.
You know, I wish I had read this when I was first trying to design my site. After I figured out I didn’t know how to design, I just took the blandest colors I could and stuck them on a Web page so as to not make anyone’s eyes bleed. Heck, even the “photo” is black and white. And gray.
Maybe it’s time I start looking into a redesign.
Bland is ok but it’s always good to work around that using highlights – nothing wrong with the so called bland hues but you can easily unite with even a simple upping of colour slightly.