Green color of the all-embracing verdant environment, light turquoise color of the gentle ocean and blue hue of the peaceful sky blanket, our nature palette is teemed with calm and serene colors that refreshes our senses the moment we experience it. There are myriads of colors but the ones which bring harmony and serenity are the cool shades. Generally when it comes to picking colors for industries like fashion, interior decoration and web-designing, the color wheel is predominantly divided into two sections warm and cool.
The terminology has deep connection with the viewers’ reaction. It emotionally and psychologically relates with the audience. Warm colors symbolize energy, warmth, happiness and passion whereas cool colors reflect tranquility, trust, reliability and confidence. When it comes to designing website for businesses, cool spectrum of colors is widely preferred. Financial institutions are deeply addicted to cool colors (especially blue) since it denotes high trust factor.
Let’s explore the cool hues:
The impression of harmony and trust created by cool colors has made them popular color band among the business websites. Blue is the primary cool color, therefore you can notice that almost every cool color comprises of some tint of blue. The cool side of color wheel basically embraces shades of blue, green and violet.
What does these colors symbolizes:
Blue: This chief cool color is hot favorite for logo designs and for designing website for banks and financial institution. Blue color signifies trust, loyalty, stability, depth, calmness and reliability.
Green: The prime color of our Mother Nature adds freshness to any design. It represents harmony, wealth, productiveness, innovation, growth and security.
Violet: The trendy and funky violet color looks unruffled. It denotes royalty, prosperity, power, strength, ambition and creativity.
Cool color theory:
- The calm and gentle quality of cool shades makes the sites welcoming and easy to use. If you want to create excitement then warm colors are best but if you want to exhibit professionalism then undoubtedly go for cooler colors
- They are decent, not too loud and create good positive impression on the viewers
- Cool hues also create great sense of illusion, it make the elements appear smaller than the actual size and farther than the actual distance
- If you are asked to make the color more cooler, doesn’t mean to make it dark or less saturated, it means to add more blue to the mixture of color
- Lighter shades of blues and greens look exceptional as background colors for websites
- You can use multiple variations of same shade and generate an enchanting color palette which makes your site look unique
How to use the calm colors?
Nature is the best source inspiration for creating awe-inspiring color combinations. You can simply look around and get idea about the application of colors.
- Blues and greens look amazing and naturalistic when combined with earthy tones like brown, beige or tan
- For digital projects, when you use RGB color scheme, in the cool side will have highest blue values while in CMYK color scheme, the cool colors will either have maximum cyan or black percentages
- The 80/20 rule works best for any color scheme. If you are designing a website with cool and warm color combination and want to maintain the coolness then use 80% of blue, green and violet shades (can also add neutral tints) and 20% of red, orange and yellow shades
Cool colors are easy to work on and suits variety of projects unlike warm colors which has limited scope. The comforting feeling which it reflects makes the designs user-friendly and helps to elevate their experience.
