The third part of our Deciding on the Basics blog series is all about picking our palette. Colours, much like fonts, layout and other design elements are largely dependent on our tastes, personality and business values.
Without going through the entire colour theory, what you have to consider is how your personality and your values translate into colour.
For example - I imaging a vibrant person with offerings injected with a sense of fun and adventure having lively yellows and oranges for their palette
If you are into the spiritual, mystical aspect of yoga, purples, lavenders and soft blues would fit in perfectly with the mood of your website.
And if you teach high intensity power flows, hints of reds combined with more neutral colours would give off a balanced effect while underpinning the energy of your classes.
Notice that I'm not really talking about colour meanings or archetypes. While that has its place in helping with the decision, its very easy to get too attached to what a colour "means" and override our instincts. So trust your instincts & knowledge of yourself, your offerings and your business first.
Lifting Colours
You can create your palette from scratch, however I do recommend lifting them from a photo to make things easier. You can easily decide if the colours appeal to you based on the photo, then it's only a matter of being able to "lift" those colours from it.
Using pre-made palettes
If you don't have a source photo, you can scroll through libraries. I recommend to look for a library that has pre-set filters according to colours or temperatures or styles (warm, cool, natural and the like). This will reduce the amount of palettes to look through. Just be aware that it's so easy to spend so much time looking through colour collections and this can cause frustration. Resource: Try out the Coolers website. It has an extensive colour library and also has a colour picker and lots of options for exporting. I used this website to pick the new palette for my Mad Yogi website, in fact.
See my tutorial video below. https://coolors.co/
Lastly, try them out before investing your heart into your palette
With my new palette, for example, I had to change two colours from the original pick because when I used it on my website, they didn't work as well as I had hoped. I test viewed the new pages (which I haven't launched yet) and saw that these two colours looked off on different devices.
So test-run your palette before implementing them on you whole site.
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