Understanding the key emotion behind ennui and the basics of experimental psychology around colour and patterns and how to use them, can help web designers combat boredom and further improve their web design. Colour can be used to stress one’s unique individuality, signalling a complete departure from competition look alikes. However, before talking about the psychology of using certain colour combinations, it is important not to forget that one must be sensitive to the needs of the visually impaired and challenged, when designing a web site.
You must not concentrate only on making web pages compellingly impressive, one must also utilise one’s skill and talent to ensure site user-friendliness, getting together a site that aims to reach as wide an audience segment, as possible.
Web designers needs must understand the capabilities of a human eye and produce user friendly web designs that cater not only to web users with normal sight, but even those with partial eye-sight, or those who are blind or suffer from red-green colour blindness.
To be a successful web designer, up your basic knowledge about how the human vision works, how the colour blind react to various designs, etc. Subject to huge variances, even in normal vision, the size of elements affects an individual user’s colour perception. Each and every individual views colours and shade intensities very much differently than others.
Light setting levels affect the inconsistencies in colour patterns, just like your hair colour changes depending on the strength of lighting you see it under. People with retina cones that are more sensitive to the colour blue, see the colour blue even when others cannot perceive it. They seem to view the world with ‘blue rather than rose-tinted glasses’. A web designer must be aware of conditions such as these and why you perceive your web design differently than others. Aside from keeping the key aspects of impaired vision and accessibility in mind, a sensitive web designer should also be aware how assistive technology can manipulate his design e.g. screen readers or text / image magnifiers, software employed by the physically disabled to enhance user interface experiences.
Some Internet users are able to read only certain colour combinations, such as, yellow text on a black background, with no room for greyscale. This means that good legibility for visually challenged and impaired users should have strong contrast as the main element of the design. Manipulate screenshots of your designs by testing their effectivity using a programme like Adobe Photoshop, converting images to greyscale, then to monochrome, seeing how it might be viewed using the most extreme visual manipulation. This can be done by increasing the contrast level to +100, a particularly useful approximation of difficulties colour blind users experience in discerning one colour / shade from another.
Become a successful web designer by adjusting your colour application now, always keeping in mind that a design cannot be considered impressive, if few people appreciate its user friendliness!
Tomorrow we talk about the psychology behind using certain colours in web design, psychology that off-shore Siterack uses to good avail!
Tags: colour psychology, web designer, web designs
