Designing With Bright Colors

He has: 578 posts

Joined: Jun 2004

Alright, I'm back at it for the first time in... ? who knows how long.

And (yay me) I have my first real client. How awesome. But, as with every good comes an evil... and the company's colors are purple and yellow. Now, these work fine in the small batches they're normally used in, and I guess I can look at pamphlets and whatnot for ideas for accent colors, but does anyone have some suggestions for an accent color or suggestions for using bright colors in general? Does anyone deal with this often?

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

Could you show us the exact colours they've been using?

I think using small amounts of colour on a white base would be your best bet for this project. You'll never be able to get away with large blocks of a really bright colour.

Design MeltDown might be helpful to you - they've got design samples listed byb colour. No purple on the list but the pink ones might give you some ideas.

JeevesBond's picture

He has: 3,956 posts

Joined: Jun 2002

Congratulations on your first proper client! Hope things go well, and don't forget to put the site in the critique section. Wink

Agreed with Megan here, use small amounts of their colours on a white background. What's their logo like? Can you do anything interesting with that?

It would be good to see what artwork you've got so far. Smiling

a Padded Cell our articles site!

They have: 24 posts

Joined: Sep 2006

Yup white backgrounds go with every color and the white will help offset the yellow so that it dont seem so bright.

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

I'm doing a site at the moment, who's company colours are purple logo with yellowy text.
I decided to just use the logo in the corner and use colours of their products for the layout (light colours), dark purple is a hard one to design around.

Take a look at abhi's avaters background, that's purple/grey

demonhale's picture

He has: 3,278 posts

Joined: May 2005

my 2 cents on this is to use darker shades of both colors as accents and make sure the other color has a higher ratio in density use than the other, and use as much white or lightgray as possible to balance the design...

He has: 578 posts

Joined: Jun 2004

Alright, despite all the push for a white background, I ended up trying to bring out the colors after viewing some sites on MeltDown (Thanks a ton Megan). I took a lot of inspiration (as in, I'm afraid I did a horrible rip, then again "Good Designer Create, Great Designers Steal") from rockbeatspaper.net. I'm not quite ready to show what I've got yet, but you'll all see soon. Thanks for the suggestions, I'm sure I'll need more.

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