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Website background colour

18th April 2011

Blue Or White?

On the background colour of our new website, should we stick with our conservative dark blue or move to white. There only ever seemed to be the 2 options, we dabbled with light grey for a while, but grey … well it’s so grey.

We wanted our logos to take centre stage, to really shine out of the page. Generally our finished logos are saved on white and placed on our blue background they really do stand out. But dark backgrounds can be a nightmare when trying to read text. On the other hand, we had been dark blue for 10 years. We have some loyal clients who come back for more, would they take one look and decide this must be someone else and click away never to find us again. So as customer recognition felt important, surely we could work round this limitation and still find an exciting new layout that spoke for us? Over the 4 years it took to bring our new design to fruition, in the rough designs the background remained blue.

I find that design works in a subconscious way, personally I always read a brief carefully as soon as it arrives because I know that even if I’m not thinking about the new project in a concentrated way, in the back of my mind there will be seeds of ideas germinating ready to spring forth when I sit down at the drawing board, well, computer.

So as we reached the final hour, the design done, other key pages styled, another hundred decisions made, in a light bulb moment we changed to white.

If you would like to read the other articles on this subject, click on the Web Design category on our blog.