Brownies Part 4
4th edition — by Patrick McNeil — Nov. 7, 2007
The Design Element
The color brown has many compelling reasons to be used, and yet, it is one of the lesser used colors on the web. There seems to be two main reasons to make use of brown color pallets. First sites doing so often have literal reasons for connecting with the colors of nature. Secondly, it is a great way to break the inherent technical connotations any web site has.
Many sites have pretty straight forward reasons for using the color. Take the
Backpackers Bazaar
for example. The site is all about activities that take place away from a computer in nature. Thoughts of getting in touch with nature are pretty obvious here. So using brown was a wise choice. It quickly sets a peaceful, nature oriented mood to the site. Connecting with the experience users desire is the key here. The site could have been all shiny and trendy, but what would that be saying? It would just be a random wrapper for the content.
The second great reason to go with brown is very related to the first. Often sites use brown to disconnect from the technical nature of the web and attempt to put more peaceful connotations into play. Quite often creative agencies will make use of this technique. Probably because most artist are trained in many skills that have nothing to do with a computer and brown helps to draw these more organic skills out.
Fuze Creative
is a prime example of this.
Connotations of brown : Warmth, comfort, steady, conservative,
earthy, natural, nature, down-to-earth, wholesomeness, simplicity, friendliness,
dependability, health, honesty, old, and aged.
Sample Usage
Links
Genopal (Color pallet creation software)
COLOURlovers (Excellent color pallet collections)
Kuler - pallet builder from Adobe /
ColorBlender.com (The
best tool I have found for easily creating beautiful color pallets)
Great color browsing resource (Named colors, by hue, etc)
Color
Scheme Generator
Color
Blender (On MeyerWeb)
Color In Motion
Color Schemer Online v2
Color Schemer Gallery
Color Symbolism
