Brown, an often underrated color, actually holds great significance in web design. Color psychology connects specific colors with specific emotions. Color psychology works with any color, however, in this blog post, we will be focusing only on the color brown.
Psychological Associations of Brown
The color brown symbolizes many emotions/traits. Some emotions/traits that are represented are loyalty, trust, groundedness, maturity, comfort, and dependability. Some other traits represented by this color are sustainability, security, and honesty.
Brown can also represent negative emotions or traits, such as boredom, dullness, emptiness, etc.
4 Examples of Websites That Use Brown in Their Design
La Pierre Qui Tourne
This website adds hints of brown around the bottom of the website. It gives off a sense of smoothness and comfort.
UPS
Not only is the UPS truck brown, but so is their website (although, the website is not fully brown). The usage of brown in this website creates a sense of trust and dependability because this company needs people’s trust to do their job.
Clint Agency
This website uses a tannish-brown color, which in this case, represents warmth.
Slate Milk
This website is white-centric, but brown is also used. The brown in this website makes it feel very comforting.
4 Examples Brown Centric Websites
Lincor (watch brand)
The background of the top portion of this website is almost completely brown. The brown used in this website creates a sense of groundedness.
Brown Sugar Coffee Roastery
Giving information about and showing pictures of cookies, this brown website gives off a soothing vibe. Which draws in people to drink their coffee.
The Famous 4th Street Cookie Company
This website contains many images of brown cookies. A sense of comfort is felt through this website’s brown color.
Hershey
The Hershey website includes information and images of chocolates that they make. The brown-themed website represents the feeling of trust. Many people love Hershey’s Chocolate. According to the color theory, this is most likely because of the trust-evoking color, brown.
4 More Examples That Use Brown Partially in Their Websites
Burger King
This company’s website uses a lighter tone of brown, almost making it look tannish. In this website, the brownish-tannish background is like the base of the page. It creates stability and trust.
Edy’s
Using a mixture of many colors, this website still manages to fit in a bit of brown. This makes the website seem very soothing and comforting. It many also be seen as trustworthy.
Go Antiques
This website sells antique furniture and objects so it feels quite “empty” although it’s not. People might think that the feeling of “emptiness” is bad, but for this website it is perfect. These antique objects are old, and old things typically feel “empty”. The perfect mixture of white and brown colors represent this feeling. Hence, this website does a great job in expressing this feeling.
Antique Piano Shop
This website uses brown as the background color. Whereas in the previous antique website, white was the background color, while brown was used for the Call to Action buttons. In this website, however, the brown color as the “base” creates a sense of stability and trust. Both websites are great in their own ways, but this one focuses more on creating a sense of trust. While the previous one focused more on making it feel “old antique”.
Summary
Brown websites are great for creating a sense of stability, trust, groundedness, and comfort. However, it is often overlooked. If we can learn to use brown in websites correctly, then it can do us wonders. The 12 examples provided in this blog post give us an idea of how to use brown in websites.
Let’s learn to appreciate the color brown for its trustworthy and comforting vibes. We should encourage more web designers to embrace brown websites.