What is Pantone?
The Pantone colour matching system was introduced in 1963, providing a universal numbering system that is used across a variety of industries to identify over 10,000 colours both physically and digitally. Over the past 20 years, Pantone have released a colour of the year based on thorough trend analysis. These colours then have a major influence on product design and purchasing decisions including fashion, interior design, and graphic design.
2021 Pantone Colour of the Year
This year, Pantone have chosen two complimentary colours, PANTONE 17-5104 Ultimate Grey and PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating.
The union of an enduring Ultimate Gray with the vibrant yellow illuminating expresses a message of positivity supported by fortitude. Practical and rock-solid but at the same time warming and optimistic, this is a colour combination that gives us resilience and hope. We need to feel encouraged and uplifted; this is essential to the human spirit.Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute
Why Use Pantone Colours in Your Web Design?
If you’re looking for a fresh, modern design for your website, incorporating this years Pantone colours is a great way to achieve this. Pantone colours trend across a variety of industries, so people will already be acquainted with the colours in their day to day lives. These colours will automatically resonate and build a familiarity.
The combination of this years colours, one bright and eye-catching, the other strong and muted, make them the perfect combination for web design.
If you’re just starting your business, including the Pantone colour of the year in your branding is also a subtle way to incorporate an element of your founding year.
How to Incorporate Pantone Colours into Your Website
There are many ways that you can incorporate Pantone colours into your web design, here are 5 of our favourites:
Decide on your main colour & accent colour
The first thing you should decide when designing your website is the colour scheme. The inclusion of two colours in the 2021 Pantone colour of the year provides not only a main, base colour but also an accent colour. Include additional complimentary colours such as white, black, and other shades of grey for example, and you have a great colour palette for getting started.
Use colours in your images
Whether you’re opting for animated images or photographs, including Pantone colours is an ideal way to tie your web design together. Both the yellow and grey make excellent background colours, and alternating them consecutively makes for an aesthetically pleasing design element.
If you’re adding a text overlay to your images, both colours are a good choice to make the text pop.
Include colours in text
Depending on your background colour, opting to use grey or yellow text instead of standard black or white can break up the content and make it more visually appealing. If you want to make certain key words or phrases stand out more, the brightness of Illuminating makes it the perfect choice.
You can also incorporate colours into headers, links, and submit buttons.
Company Logo
If your company doesn’t have a logo already, the Pantone colours may be an option to consider. Depending on the products or services you offer, sunny yellow with grey accents could provide a cheerful, energetic and appealing logo, whereas a grey logo with yellow accents could provide a more professional look.
Yellow and grey in a logo are popular choices for technology focused businesses, designers, photographers, and businesses aimed at a younger audience.
Backgrounds & highlights
Yellow and grey both make excellent choices for background colours and highlights.
Add blocks of colour to menu bars, headers, footers, buttons, and side bars. If you choose grey for your menu bar for example, you could use yellow as a highlight when the user hovers over an option.
If you’re ready to get started with designing your new website, contact Fabsite today. We offer a range of pay monthly web design options to suit all requirements.