Although minimalist designs may look simple, it doesn’t mean you can easily achieve them. Four determining factors define a minimalist site: its visuals, typography, focus, and space.
A minimalist design spans different arts and industries. Thus, it can be difficult to master it. In the world of web design, you can achieve minimalism when no more elements can be removed without affecting the website’s purpose.
Here are seven practical tips on how you can use color to create a visually appealing site:
1. Choose a Limited Color Palette
First and foremost, you must ensure that you work with well-thought-out colors. Ideally, this should work with your brand and other designs. Just ensure you avoid overpowering your site by using too many colors.
A small palette that uses an accent color helps you put the focus on the right areas. Most minimalist experts will advise that you stick to a three-color limit.
2. Use Contrast
One of the most famous types of contrast in design is color contrast. It’s one of the most basic ways to make your screen content accessible.
One of the fundamental reasons behind this is that text readability relies on being a significant contrast with its background. Accessible color schemes eliminate any discrepancies in how people with color or visual deficiencies interact with digital interfaces.
3. Use White Space
You also have to note that a minimalist web design is all about having plenty of whitespace, also known as negative space. These spaces between your content are just as vital as the content itself.
Negative space improves your users’ focus on how the content is shown. If your webpage is cluttered with many items, it could distract users from your site’s most important content.
Similarly, whitespace also forces web designers to be careful and selective about what they choose to show so that it can send a clear message to readers.
4. Experiment With Shades and Tones
The color scheme of your website is a collection of colors the designer picks for their site design. Color schemes are also known as color palettes, including as many colors as the designer chooses.
Every color can be used in different elements throughout the site. In other words, the same color could be utilized for various components.
5. Consider The Psychology of Color
Color psychology means that you should opt for a site color based on the kind of emotional experience that you want to give users. Not only could it affect your brand’s personality, but it can also trigger visitor reactions based on the type of dynamic environment you want to build.
As soon as you know what every color is known to represent, choose the most appropriate color palette that makes your site highly intuitive. For instance, you’re creating a site for your spa business.
Thus, it makes sense to opt for colors representing healing and nature, like greens or blue symbolizing trust.
6. Use Color to Highlight Important Elements
Utilizing contrast in your color scheme lets you highlight specific areas in your site, like a CTA button or an ecommerce webpage.
Usually, these make your site look more organized and allow users to differentiate various parts of the page. Let’s say you placed a side column encouraging people to know more about a specific offer or event. You can use colors with sharp contrast on the primary parts of your page.
This encourages people to look at it a lot more closely.
At Sytian Productions, (philippines web designer,) we always tell clients that the colors that they chose make it easy for people to read and direct others on important aspects of your page or site, wherein they can easily convert.
7. Test Your Color Palette
When picking colors, think about how these look on various platforms. While a particular color may look great on a desktop site, it doesn’t automatically mean it will look good on mobile or vice versa.
Ensure you expect a couple of differences in color schemes between these platforms. Various devices may read colors differently. It would be best if you put in the effort to look for the right color scheme that will work well on every platform or device; otherwise, your efforts will be wasted.
It’s also worth noting that you can’t control how every user will set up their hardware or alter the color schemes of their devices so that it’s easy on the eyes, especially during bedtime.
Over to You
So there you have it. Make sure that you apply these handy tips. Redesigning your site so that you can adopt a minimalistic feel is always a good move. Not only is having a minimalist design an excellent way to have users have a more enjoyable and effective experience, but having one never truly goes out of style. Good luck!