World Design Day and how to create your own colour palette

World Design Day 2021

For World Design Day on 27 April, we would like to take a look at corporate colours and the selection of a colour palette. Many UI designers use existing colour palettes for this purpose. This doesn't have to be a bad thing - pre-generated palettes offer very good colour choice options. That's why we'll be introducing you to some of these websites on our social media channels next week.
Today, however, we would like to show you an alternative to pre-generated palettes.

Generating colour palettes yourself - this is how it works

The very first thing to do is to select a primary colour that fits the company or theme according to the principles of colour psychology. With the colour wheel, you can then easily determine a secondary colour, should this be needed. Here, the opposite colour works very well to capture attention. This is not the perfect choice in one hundred percent of cases, but it can be a very good starting point.
After that, notification colours are needed. Here you should choose colours for successes, errors and warnings. Green, red and yellow are usually used for this. We have listed a few recommendations for working colour codes.

Green: #64BC26

Red: #EA1601

Yellow: #FAD202

For the background and text colour, it is recommended to create two copies of the primary colour. Then lower the brightness of the colour to 10 and raise it to 98. The result is two colours that are not quite white and not quite black and harmonise very well with the primary colour.
If you now select the primary colour and increase and decrease the L-value in steps of ten respectively, you get a range of usable shades. This can be done in the HSL Colour Picker of the Design Tool. The process should be repeated with all colours except the background and text colour to get a wide range of tones of the different colours.
The result is a comprehensive palette that is perfectly matched. This way, the corporate design is quickly harmonised.

Choosing the right primary colour
When choosing the primary colour, not only aesthetic aspects should play a role. The subconscious links colours with sensations and memories that are triggered when the colour is perceived. Thus, a restaurant should choose different colours than an electronics shop and a clothing chain should be different from a florist.

In an infographic by Webpage FX it is made clear that 84.7% of consumers buy a product on the basis of colour. 93% of shoppers use object colour as a selection criterion, only 6% choose based on texture and 1% buy because of sound or smell. Within 90 seconds, customers make an unconscious decision to buy or not to buy a product. And 62-90% of this is determined by colour. More than half of the respondents said they would not return to a shop for aesthetic reasons.

We have listed below what the different primary and secondary colours mean, based on concepts from Colour Psychology in Marketing.

Not enough about colour and colour psychology yet?

Then we can recommend this article from karrierebibel. None of this is your thing and you'd rather work with existing presets? No problem. We present design resources on our social media channels. Among other things, we will soon be talking about good websites for colour presets.