How To Choose Colors For Your Interior Design Website and Why This Matters.

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Need to design a website but don’t know where to start? The first stage is choosing your colors.

For an interior designer, this is going to be easy! We are going to choose them using the same approach that we would choose colors for an interior.

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Step 1-Choosing the vibe

As you know, clients usually say one of a few things:

1. I love this color/material/style, but hate these.

2. I want this room neutral.

3. I have all this existing stuff and I want to make the room look good.

4. I want to feel like this when I go into this room.

As a designer, the first approach is deciding which one is the most important and go from there. You want to choose 2 things:

1. The ‘main’ color of your website

2. The vibe of your website. Like Kelly Wearstler and her ‘vibe’ tray (not a materials board!), she selects physical representations of things that will achieve the look you want.

As designers, we are lucky because we are surrounded by a lot of beautiful things. Decide if you want your website to look perfectly coordinated, or, if that’s your style, choose a super special color. I started my website design for Design Ink with a physical sample of some limestone I really love. I took a reading of it with my NCS colour app and then I headed over to Google’s color picker page. From there I got a Hex code.

Step 2: Using my HEX code to work out the other colours.

I design my sites with Squarespace. They recommend you choose 5 colors: White, Black, Accent, Light, and Dark.

I always start with White and Black. These don't have to be pure white or pure Black but I recommend that you don’t move too far away. For readability, having contrast is important, even if you are aiming for a website that is more harmonious.

The next colour will be the Accent colour. This is a colour that we use to highlight parts of a page, such as headings, links or buttons. If you have chosen a dominant colour, then this is the color you would choose.

Finally we choose a Light & a Dark color. These are colors that work with our Accent colour, depending on the type of scheme. I take the accent color over to Adobe Color, and put the colours in the color wheel and make some choices. This should be pretty easy for you! It’s a super fun tool. Check out this short 5 min video about Adobe Color.

Yay! You’ve done it so quickly. But you’re designers- so color comes naturally😀! If you want some help loading your colors into Squarespace , I suggest you check out the post from Stanley Creative. She goes into how to do this in detail. She also has some cool templates if you are going that way and gives you some palette ideas to try out.

This is an introductory guide but there is also one other way. Let’s say you have an image that you really love. You can upload it into the website Coolors and generate colors from an image. You can then use the hex codes generated and adjust them in Adobe Color. I’ve created a short video explaining how.

I hope you find this post useful. If you are a designer who is interested in designing their own website, please sign up to the newsletter. A whole course on designing a website in Squarespace, specifically for interior designers will be launched soon. Sign up for the waitlist.

Are you :

✔️ looking for more clients

✔️ wanting to launch your new interior design biz effectively?

✔️ wanting to upskill your offerings?

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