Each colour has a range of different emotions and feelings attached to them, along with being generally associated with a type of business.

Red: A very warm, vibrant colour associated with ideas of passion, excitement, and urgency. It's a very action-forward colour, but the warmth also allows the user to feel comfortable and safe in the hands of the company - just don't overuse it.

Yellow : An energetic and refreshing colour that's excellent to use in accents. There is no colour more associated with summer, so it's great for websites relating to outdoor or summer activities. However, it can be difficult to read text on a yellow background, so pay attention to where and when you're using it.

Blue: Cool, calm, and professional. A lot of tech companies use darker blues as it gives a very sleek, and almost futuristic view of them, but it also promotes relaxation with its neutral tones, making it favorable for social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Green: Health, growth, and nature are most commonly associated with green, due to its regenerative feel. Similarly to yellow, it should be used for outdoor activities (though it shouldn't be used in conjunction with yellow), or for any form of healthcare or organic industry - it also works well for financial businesses!

Orange: Another warm colour but with very different uses to red. It has connotations with caution (think safety equipment, hunting etc.), and with autumn/fall. It's a nice way to accent a site to bring more colour and life into it, though since orange is hard for websites to display, it can look different on different browsers so be aware of this.

Purple: The definition of luxury and leisure. Purple is the colour of nobility and royalty, associating it with expensive, or high quality products. Depending on how it's used, it can also be seen as romantic, or even playful. Also, thanks to Cadbury, it's hard not to think of the rich, smoothness that most might associate with chocolate when seeing purple.

Monochrome: Though it is more of a colour scheme than a specific colour, monochrome can be used very effectively on a website. It gives ideas of luxury, similar to purple, but in a much more professional and neutral way. Fashion brands often use monochrome because of this, and the fact that it allows clothes to stand out.

Knowing the meaning behind colours, and how to choose complementary colours using colour wheels can still be difficult without being able to see the way that the colours look in front of you. Because of that, most designers have a number of sites at their disposal to serve as inspiration. Here are a few:

Coolors  - https://coolors.co/

Coolors is a colour scheme generator that has an incredible amount of functionality. You can choose a colour to start with and rapidly generate new schemes until you find the one that you like, with the ability to lock certain colours in as you go. It even shows you the colour hex codes for each so that you can easily replicate it in any image editing program.

Canva  - https://www.canva.com/learn/100-color-combinations/

Canva is a template-sharing site for all kinds of design, including web design. It's a great idea to look through their free templates, or use the link provided above to see 100 colour scheme recommendations.



Dribbble  - https://dribbble.com/shots/popular/web-design

Dribbble is all about inspiration. It provides thousands of designs to look through, with an easy to use search feature so you can look through websites similar to the one that you're going to be designing.

Land Book  - https://land-book.com/

Land Book is very similar to Dribbble, but it's entirely specialized towards web design. Checking both sites for specific inspiration is a great start when going through the early design phases of your own website.