Using the right color is very important to any design. It can literally make or break your design. While there are a lot of good colors and color combinations to use when designing, we often tend to stick with our favorite color(s).
I wanted to find out from the top web designers what their favorite colors were so I contacted these 10 awesome designers and asked them the following question.
What is your favorite color in web or graphic design and why? Can you also show me a link of where you used this color, maybe a website or an artwork, and a little bit about why you chose this color?
Note: The answers of these designers vary. Some gave actual colors while others gave the hexadecimal.
Fabio Sasso - Abduzeedo
My favorite color in web design would have to be #222222 mostly because it reminds me of old 80's consoles like Atari, which is a great influence in my work. It's also the background color on Abduzeedo.
Jacob Cass - Just Creative Design
White is my favourite color - it’s not what you do with your space, it’s what you don’t do, that matters.
Steven Snell - Vandelay Website Design
I would say that my favorite color is black but I don’t use it a whole lot because a black background doesn’t work for most sites. I did use some black and dark grays in the theme of Folio Focus.
David Perel - Obox Designs
For me it is blue and pink, I like the combo when used correctly (sometimes it can be a total disaster). It came around when we re-did Obox’s image about 3 years ago. I don’t have a particular reason for liking those colors, I just stumbled across them and appreciated the combo.
Here are examples of the colors being used in some of our designs:
Chris Spooner - Spoon Graphics
I’d probably say my favourite color is brown when it comes to design. I’m a big fan of collage style designs with snippets of paper and cardboard. Examples that spring to mind are blog.spoongraphics.co.uk and revolutiondrivingtuition.co.uk.
Mike Kus - Carsonified
I don’t really have a favourite color I use in design. Different projects require different color pallets. having said that my fav use of color I’ve done is definitely on Carsonified. I loved the challenge of making the pages work with only two colors and I love how effective it is. I think the key is to keep it simple when it comes to color. Too many colors in one design dilutes the impact of the design.
Kai Loon - Loon Design
Black, white, green, blue, and yellow are my favorites to use in design. Black and White are a must for any basic design and are good starters. Green is fresh and is related to being environment-friendly. Yellow, this is tricky, but I like to play around with it. Blue is just my personal favorite color, not for any reason.
I use most of the color on my sites, kailoon.com, themetation.com and all the works you can see in my portfolio. Recently I was tempted to start using red. In recent year, red become a symbol of success. Many successful companies are using red as their corporate color or identity.
Chris Wallace - User Interface Designer & Developer
This may be a strange response, partly because it’s technically NOT a color and partly because it’s a specific hexadecimal value, but I would have to go with #1A1A1A. Almost every design I touch uses this value one way or another, for a dark background or for headline text. It is very versatile and provides a soft, faded darkness that can be combined with any color and look great.
Soh Tanaka - Web Designer & Developer
My favorite color would be navy blue and I’ve used it as the base color for my portfolio/blog (www.SohTanaka.com). I chose this because navy blue is both masculine and calming, and it can flow with a lot of different colors. I decided to use the combination of baby blue and navy blue on my site since they complement each other well and it was also inspired by a pair of es’ skate shoes I owned a while back!
Matthew Smith - Squared Eye
Hmm. Favorite color? Feels like a trick question. Like:
Whats the wingspeed velocity of a swallow?
If I had to answer, I’d say I’m a big fan of off whites and warm greys because they allow for both shadow and highlight. The old drawing masters used paper of that color for the same reason.
(In regards to an example) Hmm, can’t show you quite yet :) - I’ve been working on several designs that use this schema, but none are launched yet. Here’s a drawing from an old master that refers to the study I’m talking about. It is by Albrecht Durer.
More About Colors in Design
While this was just an article that focused on the favorite colors of the top designers, there are a ton of great articles and posts out there that go over colors in design in a much-more in-depth way. Here are some of the best articles and series that are worth checking out:
- Color Scheme Inspiration
A series of articles from Build Internet where you can get awesome color combinations for your designs. - Find the Perfect Colors for Your Website
This is an ultimate round-up of color articles by Vandelay Design. - Anatomy of Colors in Web Design
This is a great series by OneXtraPixel that focuses on colors in web design. - COLOURlovers
The best site about colors in design. You can find design inspiration with thousands of palettes and color schemes to fall in love with.
Conclusion
While we all have our favorite colors, we all need to learn how to use other colors in our designs as well. Certain colors invoke certain feelings and we have to take advantage of that in our designs. If you look at the portfolio of these top designers, you will see that they all use a variety of different colors as well.
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