A timeless palette
Choosing a palette you have to like for years is a different job from choosing one you like today. Most people get stuck in the same spot, and it isn’t which colours. It’s how to be sure.
Trends won’t help you here. A trend is a decision with a use-by date attached, and picking this year’s colours quietly commits you to doing this again in three. Fine for a campaign. A poor way to choose what your business wears for the next decade.
What gets you unstuck is giving the decision a reason that isn’t taste. Colour you can explain is colour you can live with. So start somewhere real rather than with a colour wheel. A photograph you love and actually feel something from. Take the palette out of that.
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.
Colours from a landscape already agree with each other because the light has done the hard work of harmonising. Cream, olive and espresso didn’t come from a trend. They came from the land, and that’s a reason that doesn’t expire.
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