I’ve worked as a software engineer on many projects at this point so I have many opinions about the tech stack and how to test software. I never thought much about the colors of a website except to comment when I thought the client was adding too many colors to the palette.
Recently though, as I’ve embarked on the journey of starting a company, I’ve learned that picking colors is HARD. Our designer keeps reminding us that changing the colors is not that bad, but trying to pick a set of colors to convey the right tone of our business while also adhering to readability guidelines and navigating the likes and dislikes of the founders is complicated.
First on the list of things to convey: mood. We wanted a fun and inviting vibe to convey the familiarity and enjoyment of being a regular at someplace. We wanted to convey that feeling of home away from home. This meant warm tones and brighter colors, but not so bright as to be considered peppy. — we’re still a somewhat serious business after all.
Our designer put together a few different mood boards to help us nail down what we were going for. We ended up turning down most blues as being too somber or too business-like. Through the mood board we also realized we didn’t want jagged edges in our design accents which goes along with the warmer tone.
After the mood boards, came a round of refinement on the general families of colors. The designer set the colors on mockups of a generic website so that we could see what it would look like in a more realistic setting. It was at this point that accessibility became more of a focal point as we played with white text on colors as well as black text on colors. There were a range of palettes we couldn’t use simply because accessibility became an issue.
I’d always had a vague notion that picking colors was going to be a hard exercise, but it never really registered that it would take several rounds of refinement to settle on a color palette. And, we did finally settle on a palette that I think we’re both pretty happy with. I am glad we went through the whole thinking process, but for now, I’m glad it’s over.