Unarguably one of the most important aspects of any design is its colors. Designers create the style of a site, as well as the movement it makes, the emotion it creates, and its purpose based largely upon the color choices they make. Colors are powerful tools and an important thing all designers should understand when creating websites.

Relationships of Colors

There are plenty of terms to describe colors, which will be helpful to know later on when we discuss colors and their emotional meanings.

Complimentary colors are colors that compliment each other well and are located opposite of each other on the color wheel. These are colors like blue and orange, purple and yellow, and red and green.

Analogous colors are those located right next to each other on the color wheel, so they usually match fairly well but provide little contrast when used together.

Color Groups Based on Emotions

There are color groups that are associated with emotions: warm, cool and neutral.

Warm colors evoke warmth like red, yellow and orange.

Cool colors make people think of cool and chilly colors like blue, green and purple.

Neutral colors, as the term suggests, don’t create much of an emotion. Colors like grey and brown are neutral colors.

The knowledge of all these terms can be used to a designer’s advantage to help create meaning and suggest certain emotions in a web design without words.

There are two different color systems and both are used depending on what you’re designing for.

RGB is short for Red Green Blue, which are the three primary colors of the system and is produced with light. RGB is used on televisions, computer monitors, and any kind of screen.

CMYK, which is short for Cyan Magenta Yellow and Key (Black) is created by pigments and is used in print.

Designs on the web should be created using the RGB system.

When choosing colors for your designs, be deliberate; don’t use colors without purpose. Instead, use colors that are appropriate for your target audience, the message that the client wants you to convey, and the overall feeling you want the user to experience on your site.

Warm colors will bring about sunny emotions and are wisely used on sites that want to call to mind a feeling of happiness and joy. As a case in point, yellow became a popular color in web design in 2009 when the global economy wasn’t doing very well and companies wanted their customers to feel sunny and comfortable on their site.

Cool colors are best used on professional and clean-cut sites to achieve a cool corporate look. Cool colors stir up emotions of authority, establishment, and trust. For example, cool shades of blue are used in many banking sites, such as Chase. It wouldn’t be wise to use cool colors on a site about an upbeat topic because users will get the wrong impression.

What Colors Mean to Users

Most colors can be taken in a positive or negative manner, depending on how it’s used, the other colors surrounding it, and the connotation of the site itself.

Here are some general meanings of popular colors.

Red

Red symbolizes fire and power and is associated with passion and importance. It also helps to stimulate energy and excitement.

Orange

Orange is a combination of its two neighbors on the color wheel, red and yellow. Orange symbolizes happiness, joy and sunshine. It is a cheerful color, evoking childlike exuberance.

Yellow

Bright yellow is a happy color representing the positive yellow qualities: joy, intelligence, brightness, energy, optimism, and happiness.

Green

Green symbolizes nature and has a healing quality. It can be used to symbolize growth and harmony. People feel safe with green. Hospitals often use the color of green.

Blue

Blue is a peaceful and calming color exuding stability and expertise. It is a common color used in corporate sites because of this. Blue can also symbolize trust and dependability.

Purple

Purple is the color of royalty and sophistication showing wealth and luxury. It also gives a sense of spirituality and encourages creativity.

Black

Although black is not a part of the color wheel, it can still be used to suggest feeling and meaning. It is often correlated with power, elegance, sophistication, and depth. It is said that wearing black on a job interview can show that the interviewee is a powerful individual, and the same goes with websites.

White

White—also not a part of the color wheel—symbolizes purity and innocence. It also shows cleanliness and safety.

Freelancer Web Design Contract

Well, I have seen a lot in this career, as 8 years in business can give you a very good experience in dealing with the tool, it also gives you experience in dealing with clients, I have seen a lot of types of customers, and I won’t lie, I have been deceived from many of them, doing work for days and not getting paid for it is the worst feeling you can get in this career and unfortunately, it happens a lot to web developers and designers…

Two things can help you not falling in this trap, one is down payment and the other is a well written contract, In this article I will talk here about writing the contract

There are many things to write into a web design contract and you might even remember some other ones after you read the article, but the ones I am going to name here are hugely important and should not be missing from the deal between you and the employer. This contract might save you from some stress, time and money, so it’s necessary that you put a lot of work into a draft and use it whenever you need it.

Commencement speech at Stanford University, 2005

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

Interview with Business Week, 2004

“Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realised something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”

“And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”

Interview with Fortune Magazine, 2000

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Interview with Wired, 1996

“These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.”

Interview with Playboy Magazine, 1985

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a 5-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe that we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.”

I find I come across a lot of freelancers who don’t enjoy their job as much because of a variety of different things. They aren’t living by a set of golden rules as I do, so I thought I would share the rules that I live by whilst freelancing in order to benefit future and current freelancers a like experiencing problems in their day-to-day work.

Golden rules are simply something that you stick by, they are your code of ethics and they are how you conduct yourself in day-to-day business.

1. Keep it interesting

Working the same job over and over is always going to get boring eventually. That’s why I tend to diversify what areas each job is in and the specifics of those jobs. Occasionally I’ll see a job which is completely out there and send a message about it on the spot. This will either allow me to meet somebody new or just experience what it’s like to work with that area of the web.

It’s all about breaking the routine that every freelancer drops into from time to time. It shouldn’t feel like your copying and pasting what you did last week for a new site and changing the name on top – it should be that your adding something to your skill set, experiencing something new and dealing with different people on a week to week basis.

2. Don’t work with people that you don’t like

There’s nothing more aggravating than working with people you don’t like. It demoralises you, makes work a chore rather than a passion and basically makes you question why you do what you do.

Always be sure to save up your money in the background and have a backlog of pay stored away. This gives you a position where you can turn down clients you aren’t sure about and pull out of deals that are making your life hell.

The last thing you want to do as a freelancer is to break a relationship with a client by pulling out of a deal. But I feel that if it’s no longer fun or interesting to work (or even aggravating to work) with that client then you should be moving on and finding work else where.

3. Know when to escape

Knowing when to take a break and when to stop working is a key part of freelancing. Otherwise we’d all be doing 12 hour days every day and just get burnt out all the time.

Take weekends off, read a book, get some DVD’s, join the gym, walk the dog, visit the local shops to get a sandwich … all of these things you can do to escape working.

(This is all of course outside of work hours and during breaks.. not to avoid working in the first place.)

4. Treat every job as if it’s your first

Don’t get comfortable with a long term client, your standard should be as high as it was when you first worked for them. The day you decided that if you did a good job on the first project there may be more in it for you. This should be how you treat every job – as if your out to impress in a job interview and need that job to survive. That hunger to impress the client and keep them happy is how you deliver consistently and how you keep that client wanting to use you in the first place.

Think about this – are clients going to refer you to a friend if a friend needs work? Are they more likely to refer an excellent freelancer, or one that delivers average results?

Of course there is a twist to this rule – we all know our first jobs weren’t the best and were possibly even sloppy. That is something you’ll have to refrain from doing with this rule of course.

5. Communicate beautifully

Spell checks and grammar checks are vital for the less than able English speakers here. I often find clients talking about how poor ex-hires were with their English and it will always be off putting when a client wants to deal with the client with long conversations about jobs.

Another important part of this rule is to put communicating with the client as a priority. If they send you an e-mail it’s not ‘I’ll do it later’, it’s ‘OK I’ll respond now’. This is any time of your day you’re at the computer and this is what can set you apart from the rest. Having an instant reply or instant action towards the e-mail they’ve sent (if they want/need something doing) is always going to be something that a client likes – and it’s something that’ll win you over if your trying to impress them.

So there we have it, my golden rules of freelancing. I hope to have benefitted a few freelancers with this article.