The Color Schemes of Websites Across Different Industries

Color, as one of the most intuitive and emotionally impactful elements in website design, is not only a vital component of a brand’s Visual Identity (VI) system but also a core channel through which users form their first impressions of a brand. The right color scheme can instantly convey an industry’s characteristics, reinforce the brand’s tone, and evoke specific emotions or psychological associations. For instance, technology websites often use cool tones to emphasize rationality and a futuristic feel, while food-related websites tend to favor warm tones to stimulate appetite and create a sense of approachability.

A mature and systematic color palette does more than capture user attention quickly—it subtly shapes a brand’s professional image and builds trust. At the same time, a cohesive color system aligned with industry traits is often a key factor that differentiates “template-based websites” from “custom-designed websites.” The latter typically employ refined color strategies, coordinating brand colors, secondary colors, and functional tones to highlight brand distinctiveness. This differentiation, in turn, reflects the company’s design capability and overall strength.

Therefore, exploring the color schemes of websites across different industries is not only an essential step in design practice but also a critical process for brands to establish professionalism and competitiveness in digital communication.

The Color Composition of a Website

In a website design system, the use of color is not a matter of random combination but rather a structured design guided by brand strategy and user experience.

From a functional perspective, a website’s color scheme is mainly composed of two categories: brand colors and base colors. Brand colors carry the brand’s identity and emotional expression, serving as the core visual element of the site; base colors, on the other hand, support layout and functional presentation, ensuring overall readability and usability. The scientific balance between the two not only defines the professionalism of the website but also directly influences the user experience and perception of the brand.

1 Brand Color System

The brand color system is a complete palette derived from the primary brand color, developed through color-matching principles and the HSL color model. It not only includes the main brand color for web presentation but also extends to interactive colors, supporting colors, and gradient variations. Such a systematic approach to color ensures a cohesive overall style while enhancing user experience and visual hierarchy.

1). Website Brand Color

The website brand color is derived from the brand’s Visual Identity (VI) system or distilled from the logo palette. It is an essential component of the VI system and a cornerstone of the website’s overall color scheme. Supporting colors and interactive brand colors are later developed on the foundation of this primary tone.

Brand colors are not only the soul of a website’s visual design but also a direct expression of the industry’s nature and the brand’s personality. They set the basic tone of the site, with the primary brand color determining its overall atmosphere. For example:

• Technology companies often choose blue (e.g., IBM, Huawei Cloud) to convey professionalism, rationality, and a futuristic vision.

• Food and beverage brands tend to favor red or orange (e.g., McDonald’s, KFC) to stimulate appetite and convey energy.

Brand colors should be used strategically rather than excessively, focusing on key areas such as the logo, header, footer, buttons, and highlighted text. This ensures strong recognition and clear visual focus.

2). Brand Interactive Color

The brand interactive color is usually generated by adjusting the hue (H), saturation (S), lightness (L), or transparency of the primary brand color through the HSL system. This derivation ensures a seamless integration with the main brand color.

• Purpose: It is applied to interactive feedback, such as button hover and click states, or hyperlink interaction effects.

• Example: Alipay uses deep blue as its primary color, and in interactive states, it extends into lighter blue shades for button hover and click feedback. This not only reinforces brand consistency but also enhances the clarity of user interaction cues.

3). Brand Supporting Color

The brand supporting color is also derived from the primary color using the HSL system, typically with lower saturation. This ensures it does not overshadow the primary color while enriching the visual hierarchy of the page.

Purpose: It is applied to background areas, card backgrounds, icons, decorative elements, and key information, serving to create contrast, highlight content, and enhance layered presentation.

4). Brand Gradient Color

Brand gradient colors have become an important technique in recent years to enhance visual appeal, adding a sense of modernity and spatial depth to websites.

• Purpose: They increase the visual richness of a page and help convey a youthful, technological, or premium feel.

• Example: Instagram purple-to-orange gradient has become a brand signature, while Bilibili uses blue gradients to highlight a youthful and tech-savvy vibe.

2 Base Colors

Base colors, centered on the grayscale system of black, white, and gray, represent the most stable and neutral elements in website design. They act as the “stage colors” of a page, ensuring readability and visual balance while providing a supportive background for the presentation of brand colors.

1). Text Color

In web design, the choice of text color directly affects readability and the efficiency of information hierarchy.

Body text typically uses neutral colors such as black, white, or gray. Black provides the highest contrast and ensures maximum clarity for reading, while gray is often applied to secondary text, such as timestamps, descriptions, or labels. This creates a contrast with the main text without causing visual distraction.

To emphasize key information, higher-contrast text or text in brand colors can be used. For example, highlighting critical data or button prompts in the primary brand color within a paragraph effectively guides users’ attention to core content.

In card-based designs, the layering of text colors is particularly important. Titles and body text, labels and annotations should have clear distinctions in saturation and lightness. This allows users to quickly recognize the priority of information while browsing, enhancing both reading experience and the accuracy of information delivery.

2). Background Color

Background color is not only the “foundation” of a page but also a key factor influencing the overall atmosphere and brand tone.

In practice, base backgrounds often use grayscale tones (such as light gray or off-white), which keep the page clean while providing sufficient support for content.

To avoid a page feeling too cold or monotonous, subtle hints of the primary or supporting brand colors are often introduced into the grayscale background (e.g., bluish gray or greenish gray). This approach maintains the neutrality and versatility of the base background while subtly enhancing brand recognition, creating a more cohesive and harmonious visual style.

At the same time, background color also helps with information segmentation. For example, contrasting light and dark tones can differentiate sections, or light backgrounds within cards can enhance visual hierarchy. These techniques make it easier for users to intuitively understand the page structure.

3). Functional Colors (Status Colors)

Functional colors, also known as status colors, are an indispensable part of a design system, used to convey operation results, system states, or user feedback.

These colors are typically derived from the base color palette, adding noticeable color cues to the grayscale foundation to ensure high recognition and intuitive understanding within the interface. Common applications of functional colors include:

• Error: Red, emphasizing severity and alertness, commonly used for form validation errors or system failure messages.

• Success: Green, conveying positive feedback or completion, suitable for scenarios such as successful submissions or completed payments.

• Warning: Orange or yellow, alerting users to pay attention without indicating a critical error, often used for low battery warnings or impending expiration notices.

• Info: Blue, representing neutral guidance or informational messages, enhancing the overall user-friendliness of the interface.

In e-commerce websites (such as JD.com or Taobao), the use of functional colors is particularly critical. High-contrast status colors allow users to quickly understand system feedback—for example, red alerts for order submission failures, green notifications for successful payments, or blue messages for logistics updates. This color language not only improves operational clarity but also enhances user trust and the sense of security during interactions.

Color Schemes for Technology and Internet Industry Websites

In website design for the technology and internet industries, blue is often used as the core color. Blue represents rationality, professionalism, and a sense of the future, which is why many internet companies choose it as their brand color. However, relying solely on blue can easily lead to visual fatigue for users. To create differentiation while maintaining a “technological” feel, it is important to appropriately combine supporting and contrasting colors, as well as to use gradients and dark-themed styles to enhance visual depth.

1 Blue Brand Color and Differentiation Strategy

Extension with Adjacent Colors: Based on the primary blue, adjacent tones such as blue-purple or blue-green can be introduced as supporting colors for icons, data visualizations, or localized page backgrounds. This approach maintains visual unity while avoiding monotony. For example, Microsoft Azure website uses blue as the primary color but incorporates blue-green in illustrations and charts, giving the interface a more dynamic feel.

Accent with Contrasting Colors: Adding warm tones like yellow or orange to CTA buttons or highlighted information can quickly capture users’ attention. For instance, on Dropbox’s predominantly blue pages, yellow interactive buttons stand out prominently, enhancing conversion rates.

2 Use of Gradient Colors

Gradient colors are often used to create a technological atmosphere. Gradients such as blue-to-purple or blue-to-green not only enhance the sense of spatial depth but also give the interface a futuristic feel. For example, Stripe homepage features a blue-to-purple gradient background, which is both clean and visually infused with a tech-forward vibe.

3 Black Immersive Style

Dark-themed designs emphasize a sense of futurism and sophistication, making them particularly suitable for high-end hardware, artificial intelligence, or 3D interactive displays.

Color Schemes for Fashion and Creative Industry Websites

Color schemes for fashion and creative industry websites are typically the most open and flexible, allowing designers greater freedom for experimentation and innovation. Even so, they still follow certain common principles:

1 Emphasizing Personality and Differentiation

Websites in the fashion and creative industries often use color to highlight brand personality. Colors can be bold, highly contrasting, or even unexpectedly combined. For example, a trendy brand might use highly saturated clashing colors (bright orange + teal), while a luxury brand tends to favor low-saturation tones like black, gold, and gray to convey a sense of sophistication.

2 Harmonizing Images and Color

These websites often feature large-scale photography or visual works as their core content, with color schemes typically extracted from the images. The main and supporting colors are then extended across the page to maintain overall visual cohesion. For example, a site might use cool blue-gray tones commonly found in model photos as the base, paired with a contrasting red for button accents.

3 Multicolor Combinations

Compared to other industries, fashion and creative websites more frequently use multicolor schemes to create a vibrant atmosphere. For example, Figma design style often features colorful blocks, with each functional module assigned a distinct color. This approach emphasizes creativity while maintaining a clear interface structure.

4 Common Characteristics

• Clean Base Colors: Backgrounds are often white, black, or gray, ensuring that the visuals and content remain the focal point.

• Vivid Accents: Supporting or interactive colors are usually highly saturated to create strong visual impact.

• Colorful Vibrancy: Multiple colors are allowed, but rhythm and hierarchy must be maintained to avoid a chaotic appearance.

Color Schemes for Machinery and Industrial Manufacturing Websites

Websites in the machinery and industrial manufacturing sectors follow a completely different color logic compared to fashion and creative industries. Due to the nature of the industry, content is primarily focused on product specifications, technical principles, and application cases. With a high information density and professional focus, the color scheme must be more restrained and consistent to ensure user concentration and clarity while reading.

1 Emphasizing Consistency and Extendibility

The color system of industrial manufacturing websites typically revolves around the primary brand color. Supporting and interactive colors are usually derived by adjusting the lightness or saturation of the brand color, rather than introducing too many new hues.

Example: A machinery company uses deep blue (#003366) as its brand color, a desaturated light blue (#4F6D8A) as the supporting color, and a brighter blue (#0055AA) as the interactive color, maintaining overall consistency.

2 Restrained Use of Contrasting Colors

Unlike the bold or contrasting colors commonly used in the internet industry, industrial websites rarely employ bright contrasting hues directly. When emphasizing CTA buttons or alert messages, small amounts of red or orange may be introduced, but their usage is limited to avoid disrupting readability.

Example: A download button might use red (#C62828), while the rest of the interface remains primarily blue-gray, highlighting the action without compromising overall consistency.

3 Information Density and Readability Take Priority

Since machinery industry websites contain a large amount of tables, specifications, diagrams, and text descriptions, high contrast between background and text is essential. White backgrounds with black text or light gray backgrounds with dark gray text are typically used, avoiding decorative or distracting backgrounds.

Example: Background #F5F5F5 with body text #222222 ensures long periods of reading without causing visual fatigue.

Conclusion

In website design across different industries, color is not merely a visual element—it is a direct expression of brand value and industry characteristics. Whether it’s the rational blues of the technology sector, the vibrant and creative palettes of the fashion industry, or the restrained consistency of industrial manufacturing, each approach reflects the deep connection between color, user psychology, and information communication. A well-planned color scheme enhances both the visual recognition of a website and the user experience.

If you want to create a website design that aligns with your brand identity while balancing aesthetics and functionality, explore the possibilities with Jane Framer Studio and let color become the most powerful expression of your brand.