Color in CSS Design: Color and Aesthetics

As mentioned earlier, colors and their combinations are capable of projecting aesthetics and are a universally recognized measure of visual aesthetics. Numerous studies suggest that colors play important role in users’ appraisal of the aesthetics of user interfaces, including websites’ user interfaces. Studies also suggest that when users prefer the colors or color combinations of a website and judge them to have high aesthetic quality, they end up making positive decisions about the website. For example, they are highly likely to predict that the site will be easy to use as well as to decide, for example, to purchase from it if it is selling something. Users typically describe color as a factor in how they judge the aesthetic appeal of websites and how easy they feel the sites will be to use. Also, designs judged to be aesthetically pleasing are typically characterized by the harmonious use of colors. Factors that contribute to this judgment have been suggested to include preference for a color combination, perception of harmony between the colors, and preference for a color in relation to its background. For example, the more the hue’s contrast is between an object’s color and the background, the more the color of the object is preferred. However, while color obviously plays a significant role in the aesthetics of a website, there are also other important components of design that contribute to the aesthetics of a website as a whole. Again, the role of aesthetics in Web design is discussed in Chapters 23 and 24.

Source: Sklar David (2016), HTML: A Gentle Introduction to the Web’s Most Popular Language, O’Reilly Media; 1st edition.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *