When you use GoEngine to design your law firm website, you need not worry about color selection because our specialists will curate the best colors and color schemes for you. We’ll the research and the work to make sure that your colors will match your brand and they'll also make the biggest psychological impact on your prospective clients.
Colors can influence how a potential client interprets what they see and a website’s layout and typography — and, when done well, colors can have a positive effect on every web visitor’s evaluation of your entire brand.
If you’re looking to get a deeper understanding of website color theory for law firms, this blog post will give you a great overview of the topic.
How Do I Choose the Right Color Palette for My Legal Website?
To choose the right color palette for your website, start with primary colors that represent your brand and then choose additional shades from the main color wheel. When selecting these tints, consider accent colors that work perfectly on light and dark modes across mobile devices.
Consider Different Color Schemes
A color scheme is a combination of colors. A color scheme includes one or more of the twelve primary colors of the color wheel. You can come up with additional colors by combining those twelve colors.
It’s up to you whether to choose between contrasting colors and analogous colors. There are some color combinations that work well in most cases. However, you must be careful with your color choice because it will affect how prospective clients perceive your brand, website, and products.
When choosing the color combinations for your legal website, it's helpful to use one of these color schemes:
- Monochromatic Color Scheme: A Monochromatic color scheme is based on a single tint or a single color or tint of color. Combining similar colors can bring a sense of cohesion and relaxation to your website visitors because of the lack of definition in this color scheme. This configuration is stimulating, based on the primary color you choose. Also, you can take your base color, then finding lighter colors and darker colors by making incremental changes by adjusting its hue, saturation, and lightness.
- Analogous Scheme: An analogous color scheme uses color configurations that create a sense of harmony, regardless of whether the tints are cooler or warmer. Consider a palette with orange, yellow, and red for warmth, or a cool one with blue color, green, and violet.
- Complementary Color Scheme: Complementary color schemes begin with two primary colors and then branch out to their various tones, tints, and shades. A Complementary color palette can add character and depth to your web pages.
- Split Complementary: A split complementary color palette mixes exact opposite colors in the color wheel. These include combinations of violet and yellow, blue and orange, and red and green. However, it's imperative to note that if you choose the split complementary color scheme, it's not compliant with color accessibility guidelines.
- RGB vs. HSL vs. HEX Value: There are other approaches that you can take to find finding the perfect color scheme. Red, green, blue (RGB) is a combination of common colors that are used frequently in website design. Hexadecimal (HEX) is a shorter code for red, green, and blue color pigmentations, and it's typically a number that's generated automatically by the program you’re using. Most designers create color palettes using HEX values, but a less complex alternative to achieve consistency is to use HSL. Hue saturation lightness (HSL) is a convenient way to understand color schemes without having to understand RGB or HEX codes. If using RGB and HEX codes is challenging, consider using HSL to find the perfect color scheme.
- Triadic Color Scheme: A triadic color palette uses a combination of three colors equidistant from each other in the color wheel. To use this color scheme, there must be a hierarchy of colors. Otherwise, the colors you choose will all fight for attention. As with any other color scheme, you must use hints so that the triadic colors aren't too vibrant. You can use primary, tertiary, or secondary color combinations.
- Tertiary Color Scheme: You can create tertiary colors by mixing a primary color with a secondary color. Examples of tertiary colors include red-orange, blue-green, and yellow-green. It's essential to note that black and white technically aren't colors, but you can use them to create a lighter or dark color scheme.
Related: Law Firm Website Design
Build a Color Palette for Your Website
To build a perfect color palette for your law firm's website, focus on primary, secondary, and neutral colors:
- Primary: Primary colors are the main tints on the color wheel. This includes red, blue, and yellow. These should be the prominent colors you use throughout your website. Be sure to pick eye-catching colors that will evoke the feeling you want your website visitors to experience as they browse through your website.
- Secondary: You create secondary colors by mixing two primary colors. For instance, mixing red and blue creates magenta, and red and yellow create orange. If your brand uses two primary colors, using a flare of secondary colors may also make sense for your law firm's website.
- Neutral: Typically, neutral colors don’t fall on the color wheel and they're considered as hues without an “actual color.” These include blacks, browns, grays, tans, and whites of the spectrum. These colors complement primary and secondary colors. You can use them as font hues and background colors to create a neutral feeling.
Learn More: How Much Should a Law Firm's Website Cost?
What Is Color Psychology?
Color psychology explains how colors affect our emotions, attitudes, feelings, reactions, decisions, and behavior.
How every individual perceives colors is subjective. However, there are some general guidelines regarding color effects that have a broad meaning, including:
- Cool Colors: Cool colors have a soothing effect, and they make us feel calm. These colors include purple, blue, and green. Often, these colors remind you of the sky and water. It's crucial to note that cool colors recede in space.
- Warm Colors: These colors are more vivid and sometimes they can be overwhelming. Warm colors include yellow, orange, and red. These colors can remind us of heat and sunlight. They give the impression of an advance in space and coming closer.
- Happy Colors: These are bright and warm colors, including pink, orange, red, and yellow. Blue and green are other examples of happy colors. Each of these colors has an uplifting effect on us. That's because light colors and bright colors make you feel happier and more optimistic.
- Negative Colors: Sometimes, purple, blue-green, blue, and violet can generate negative feelings. These colors may make you sad. Negative colors are characterized by low brightness and saturation.
- Positive Colors: Colors, such as yellow, orange, and red, are energetic. They generate positive feelings and can bring you excitement and joy. Positive colors are characterized by high saturation and high brightness.
Colors can cause different emotions and reactions among people. So, it's essential that you choose your colors carefully, or otherwise, your website won’t cause the effect you want it to.
How Do You Choose The Best Colors for Your Legal Website?
So, how do branding specialists decide on a website’s colors? Obviously, it's much more complex than simply choosing your favorite color. It involves finding ways for colors to help tell your story in an authentic and believable way.
Branding experts start by understanding what your law firm is specifically all about. They focus on your law firm's Unique Selling Proposition and lay out all the reasons to believe the proposition. Many of these experts then conduct a competitive review, exploring what other colors your competitors use, and their value, within the legal industry. So, to choose the right colors for your law firm's website, ask yourself:
- What is your firm’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?
- What are the reasons for website visitors to believe your USP?
- How do your competitor’s marketing efforts look like?
- What colors would represent your proposition the best?
When handled properly, colors can help you tell your law firm’s story, and to provide a backdrop for the brand messaging, your calls-to-action, and the contact information.
Also, you can choose your website's colors by asking yourself and every other decision-maker at your law firm:
- How your law firm differs from your competitors.
- What are your competitors doing on their websites, color-wise?
- What are prospective clients looking for?
- What emotions are potential clients probably feeling and what colors will resonate perfectly with those emotions?
- Are there any visual cues you want to bring in from your locality, practice areas, or actual physical office to tell your story better and connect with the digital world?
Finally, it's best to think of colors as a template to tell your story. Similar to your law office, when prospective clients come to visit, how do you want them to view and feel about your law firm? A blue couch is one thing, an entire office painted red is obviously something you should avoid.