How To Pick An Awesome Colour Palette For Your Blog Or Website

How To Pick An Awesome Colour Palette For Your Blog Or Website.

Every time we go onto a blog we are greeted with the website’s colours.

We may like them, or we may not – but what’s important is if it was memorable or not.

Whether we made a specific note of the colours or not isn’t important. The back of our minds remembers these so the next time we visit that website we remember we have seen this before.

This post is aimed at those who need help in choosing a colour palette or colour scheme for their blog, and where to get inspiration on if they don’t have a clue what to pick or where to start!

I am not an expert in branding by any means! 

The colour palette you choose for your blog can of course be used for your brand, but we aren’t getting as in-depth here.

For new bloggers who maybe aren’t sure of what colours they want for their brand, this post is just to help you pick initial blog colours.

Chances are if you have a new blog your blog colours will change.

Rarely does anyone start a new blog with a set of blog colours and then carry this colour palette with them as their brand for years to come!

As with anything, it takes time to get a feel for things and whether you feel it suits you and your brand going forwards.

 

Colour Theory

You absolutely do not need to be an expert in colour theory to design a colour scheme for your blog.

What I would recommend however is to learn a little about it, and use this knowledge while choosing the colours for your own website.

Colour theory – on a very basic level – is a collection of guidelines/rules which are used to portray a message and communicate with your readers.    

They are guidelines to follow as to which colours compliment others, and how to choose colours that go well together.

It can also help to show you which colours stand out the most against which other colours.

This is a good resource for more information:

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/color-theory

Reading up and learning the basics of colour theory will help you choose a well rounded colour palette for your blog!

 

Why It’s Important To Choose A Colour Palette For Your Blog

Similar to a brand, you want people to remember you.

You want your audience to recognise your blog so when they come back to it, they are familiar.

Choosing your own palette of colours for your blog makes you stand out.

Imagine you went onto a blog and everything was a random colour.

If you then came across this blog a couple of months later, would you remember it?

Probably not! 

Blog colours and colour schemes do change over time as mentioned, but keeping something the same will help readers recognise your website.

Tweaking things is totally okay, but I would avoid doing a total overhaul on your blog colours too often!

The more we see something the more we recognise and trust it. If someone has searched for different information on multiple occasions and your blog has shown up and they have gotten the information they needed, they will see you as a credible source. This helps for growing an audience for your blog as your readers will trust you over a website they don’t recognise.

Your blog is a personal expression of you.When choosing a colour palette for your blog, you can pick colours that you love or are most drawn to. 

Favourite colour ever is orange? Absolutely incorporate this!

Once you have chosen your blog colours you can use those colours across social media and Pinterest. 

Using the same colours across social media can make your images instantly recognisable.

Without worrying about a full brand kit at this stage as a new blogger, you can still make your images tie in with the colour scheme of your blog.

It takes time out of decision making to have pre-set colours.

Knowing exactly what colours to go for, or which colours to match a new colour to, can certainly speed up the process of creating pins/social media images.

 

 

Get Inspiration From Google or Pinterest

Don’t copy someone else’s colour palette of course!

Inspiration for which colours you want for your own website is absolutely okay.

You can try searching for a generic term like “colour combination for website” or “attractive colour combination”. Trying a few different “colour scheme for blog” related search terms should bring up a lot of different ideas for you.

If you know roughly what you want but aren’t quite sure on shades, you can try searching for “pink colour scheme” or “blue and purple colour scheme”.

This should help you narrow down roughly what colours you are drawn to where you can then move on to creating your own blog colour palette.

A bit further down I’ll be showing you how to take one or two colours and turn them into a full colour palette for your blog so don’t worry if you still aren’t sure! 

 

Decide What Vibe You Want Your Blog To Have

If you are finding yourself endlessly scrolling Pinterest or Google and still can’t come up with a rough idea of what you like, another option is to try working out what vibe you want your blog to have. 

Depending on your niche, this could play a part in which colours you choose for your blog.

For example if your blog is all about self care, meditation and peaceful living, you may want to choose more muted tones or could search for “harmonious colour scheme”.

If your blog is all about trees and woodland walks in a certain part of the world, you can try searching for “earth tones” or “natural colour scheme”.

If you blog about something bright like Tropical Fish, you may want pops of bright colour all over your blog to match the vibe of your content.

A darker theme may be suited to those who’s blogs are about Space etc.

You get the idea!

You can absolutely create your colour theme around a vibe as opposed to a specific “set”.

 

Things You May Want To Avoid

There are of course no hard and fast rules when it comes to choosing the colours for your blog, but there are “best practices” you can follow. 

Try to not choose too many colours.

If you are wanting people to recognise your blog from a few main colours or an attractive colour combination, having 14 different colours won’t help this! 

I would aim to choose 3-4 colours as this is a good amount and will cover most things you will need colours for with your blog.

You can go up to 5 if you’re using a couple of shades of the same colour, but with the stronger colours, I would keep it around 1 or 2 colours.

I wouldn’t recommend going for overly clashing colours.

Now that’s not to say you couldn’t use two different bold colours, but clashing colours can make it harder to read.

User experience is so important, so making sure everything is readable and not overwhelming for your readers is something you should take into consideration.

On the flip side, you will want to avoid colours that don’t stand out at all.

Overly pale/muted colours can be tricky for everyone to see. It can make links and buttons hard to locate and can make text nearly invisible.

There are lots of ways to add in those pale or muted colours, but that also keeps your blog readable to everyone.

If you think it’s “potentially” too pale/visible, I would avoid using it.

We all have different strengths of vision and on a smaller device like a phone, those pale colours may not show up at all.

 

Use A Colour Palette Generator

The reason I wanted to mention all of the above points first before introducing a colour palette generator is that it’s too easy to get carried away picking loads of fun colours but soon realising they don’t fit the vibe of your blog at all!

Having at least some idea of the colour palette you want – or even one main colour or the vibe – will really help.

Below you will find a few different colour palette generators to help you choose the perfect colour palette for your blog:

 

Coolors.co

I will start with the colour palette generator I used as it’s so easy to use and doesn’t overwhelm with too many options in terms of shades.

You can of course change the shades on it, but I will show you below what this looks like.

I mentioned this website on my tools and resources page as it’s an amazing resource for new bloggers.

You start the generator, and press spacebar to get 5 random colours presented to you.

You can hit the spacebar again to keep getting new colours!

If you find a colour or two you like, you can hover over these and “lock them” (there are shade options to change these if the colour isn’t quite right but is close).

Then when you next press the spacebar, the colours you have locked will stay but the others will change.

You can go in each colour and manually choose one also.

 

Colormind

The second option which is most similar to use to Coolors is Colormind. 

The boxes for the colours are a lot smaller so you don’t get the same “in your face” effect.

As with Coolors, you can generate different colour palettes and lock the colours you like.

The benefit of Colormind though is that you can upload an image! 

From this image it will then generate a colour palette based off of that image.

This means if you find an image you really like from Google or Pinterest, whether it be specific colours or a photo that has the right vibe, you can upload it, and your palette will be created for you.

You can then re-generate the palette if the colours aren’t quite right but it will use the same image for reference. 

 

 

 

Colourlovers

Colourlovers is a good option if you are more aware which blog colours you are wanting to choose for your website.

You don’t get a generator but can make your own colour brand palette by clicking each square and choosing each colour individually.

The good thing here is that it shows you multiple shade options for the colour you have chosen, so you can compare a few different shades to get exactly the ones you want.

If you’re feeling a bit more adventurous or are more into colour theory and design, one of the following two websites may be more suited to you. 

Both of the below websites are amazing resources to choose an awesome colour palette for your blog, but are a little more advanced/trickier to use to get the exact colours you are looking for.

 

Adobe Colour Wheel

This Adobe colour wheel colour generator is good if you want to visually see the shades and how they compliment other colours.

You can choose one of the options down the left hand side before starting to drag the circles round the colour wheel.

There is a little arrow under each of the 5 colours and you can click one to choose as your base colour. This will be the base that all other colours and shades will be matched to.

There are lots of ways to modify and change the colour tones under each option.

 

 

Paletton

Paletton is a great option for if you are looking for lots of different tones within the same colour.

You can move the 5 small circles within the main circle and can again change shades as you go.

You can add further colours into the mix and can change their corresponding shades also.

It is a great representation of how different the different shades of the same colour can be, and how well they go together (or clash).

 

I really hope that by the end of this you are able to choose a colour palette for your blog or website! 

As a quick summary:

Colours can always be changed down the line, but having a good colour palette made up so you have set colours for your blog will really help in the meantime.

You can of course think about using these colours in your branding which you will stick with for a long time, but if you are a new blogger with a brand new website, choose an awesome colour palette for your blog and go with it!

If you need to use Google or Pinterest for inspiration then you can do this!

Knowing the vibe of your blog can also help and you can look up related terms like “luxurious colours” or “adventurous colours” as this may provide extra inspiration!

Then you can use one of the colour palette generators mentioned above and you will then be set with your colours!

If you have a Canva Pro account you can save your blog colour palette into your Canva brand kit so it’s all saved and ready to go every time you are creating images!

 

 

You can save more than one set of brand colours into Canva pro if you do decide to change colours at any point – I think most of us have, at least a couple of times over the years! 

That’s it! 

You should be all set up with an awesome blog colour palette!

Leave your links in the comments below so I can see what colour combinations you have chosen! 

 

Speak soon!

 

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