How to Choose a Color Palette for Your Website: A Strategic Approach

There are a million resources out there for learning about and understanding color theory, but that is not this post. What I have not found is more of a systematic approach to choosing brand or website colors. Sure you can pick some colors that look good and that you like but that’s pretty subjective and not very intentional. And if you’re a designer, telling a client “I just chose these colors because they look good” doesn’t instill a lot of confidence either. Even if you’re a business owner and just creating a DIY brand you want to put a little more thought into it. In this post, we’ll break down a strategic, step-by-step approach on how to choose a color palette for your website, ensuring your colors not only look good but also align with your brand’s values.

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Setting the Foundation

The first step in choosing a color palette is creating a mood board that reflects the brand’s personality and design direction; ideally after you’ve established some sort of project brief or have a good understanding of the general design direction the company is going.  As a 33-year-old white guy, I think I find way too much joy in creating moodboards than should be appropriate BUT this to me is the most helpful way to start exploring. There’s a lot that can go into creating a mood board so for the sake of brevity I’ll keep it simple. Create a Pinterest board and start searching for words that are correlated with the business or industry in which you’re working.  From there start saving images (posts? Pins? Whatever they’re called) to your board that you believe fit the brand. Don’t worry about things matching too much yet, just start picking items that you believe fit the brand and the direction you’re going for. Go for a mix of images, typography, and textures or patterns. Here’s the board I created for my own brand, SAMCOM DESIGN.

Pinterest Board

Once you’ve got at least 30 or so pins on the board you’ll want to widdle this down.

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Define Brand Traits

Before diving into color selection, it's essential to define 3 to 5 key brand traits that describe your company or website. Quick side note, there’s a lot to consider here with who your target audience is and what will appeal to them. I won’t get into that but will say you should make sure these traits align with your audience and the image you’re projecting to them.

Here are some of the traits I went with for the SAMCOM brand:

• Inspiring
• Stylish
• Adventurous
• Edgy
• Exceptional

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Once you have your own list, you can refine your mood board to align with these traits. 

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Refine Your Mood Board

Now that you have some traits and a direction in mind aim to pick about 9 pins or images from your board that have a mix of images, typography, and textures and arrange them together in a 3 x 3 grid. It's also a good idea to have an image of your customer persona within this grid. You’ll probably switch images out as you realize which ones fit together so take your time. Eventually, you should start to see a coherent trend take shape.

Here’s the final result of the mood board I created for my brand. I gave mine a name and further described some other attributes contained within it. You don’t have to do this if you’re just picking color but having this information can help you be more intentional with your choices and help when explaining them to someone else.

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Draft Colors

Now the fun part–putting some colors together. I’ll probably catch a lot of flack for my approach here but you know what this is my approach and it’s been working for me. So, the next step I take is super simple. First, take a screenshot of your mood board and save it somewhere you can find it. Go to Adobe Color and find the Create tab. Click Extract Theme, and upload your screenshot here. This is going to use your moodboard and pull out a color theme based on the colors you’ve used here. Here’s my result:

Super simple right? How cool, now you have a color palette that’s been created that’s a little bit more objective. Now, I typically don’t stop here because there are a couple of other small things to consider before finalizing. 

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Finalizing Your Color Palette

Before I finalize brand colors I want to acknowledge that there are a ton of other things that can be considered here like types of color palettes or what certain colors mean (great resource here) I would recommend having a basic understanding of those theories but like I said I’m not going to get into that. This is simply my basic approach to finding colors for a brand or web design. So with that, here are a couple of final questions I’ll ask myself.

First question, what is the primary color? This will be the most prominent color that is used on your website and possibly your call to action. For me this is obvious, it’s going to be that orange color in the image below. Your palette might have a little more variation so you’ll need to decide what makes the most sense. Second question, do you have a complementary color to the primary color? Typically this one is opposite on the color scale to the primary color or at least contrasts the primary one well. Having a secondary complementary color will make sure you have a color that can be used in tandem with the primary color without washing it out or worrying about accessibility.

With those basic considerations, here’s the final palette color I went with. 

Ending Comments

Ultimately, Choosing the right colors for your website can significantly impact your brand’s perception and usability. By following this systematic approach, you can ensure your website’s color palette is cohesive, intentional, and aligned with your brand’s identity.

If you're still feeling unsure, try this method out and see how your colors come together. Need more help? Feel free to reach out for further guidance!

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