A timeless palette
The hero on my own site is a stretch of golden hour. Warm hills, low light, that gold-fading-to-cream you only get for twenty minutes a day. I picked it for what those colours do.
In daylight our eyes are sharpest on green, the colour nature trades in most, so a palette pulled from a landscape reads as easy on the eye, not loud.
A colour wheel has its place, but a palette with feeling tends to start somewhere warmer. A photograph you love and feel something from. Colours from a landscape already agree with each other because the light has done the hard work of harmonising. Trends have their place too, but cream, olive and espresso didn’t come from one. They came from the land.
When a brand pulls its palette from the natural world, it bypasses the current design fads entirely. It feels rooted, which is a pretty good definition of timeless.
So if you’re choosing colours for your own site, here’s where I’d start.
- Find your photo. A landscape, a corner of your world, something you’d happily look at every day.
- Pull five tones from it, lightest to darkest.
- Give each one a job. The palest is your background, the room everything sits in. The darkest is your words, so they read without effort. One from the middle is your accent.
- Let the calm one lead. Most of the page open and quiet, a little of the mid-tones, only a touch of the accent.
- Save the accent for what matters, a button, a price, one word worth remembering. Used sparingly it pulls the eye. Used everywhere it pulls nothing.
Then one last check. Make sure your words are dark enough on the background to read without squinting. Lovely is worth nothing if it’s hard to read.
More soon. x