19 Approaches to Color

With over 9 billion indexed sites on the web and counting, sites are having to do more to get noticed and encourage users to spend time on them. Color is becoming more and more important in making your page stand out. Here are some sites that do just that: use interesting colors in unusual combinations to stand out from the billions of standard color schemed sites out there.

ColourPixel
Besides being bright and colorful, what really caught Dan Rajan's eye in ColourPixel‘s site, was the use of black, where other sites would have used white. The reason white is used is because the contrast between it and other colours is easier on the eyes, and so more accessible to users, but here larger black boxes have been used to encapsulate text, which is white. This actually achieves the goal of drawing his attention to the text within them, rather than the actual boxes themselves as part of the design. Other than that, the background of the site achieves what the designer calls an ‘ethnic’ look, using displaced pixels to achieve a tapestry effect. The Rainbows are used rather gratuitously, but offer a nice differentiation of color combined with the subtle curly brackets in the background.3