#237: WP-Tonic Round-Table “Basic Design Principles From Color Palette to Layout for Your Website”

This week’s roundtable gathered to discuss Design Elements for your WordPress website including selecting a color scheme, and fonts. Sallie Goetsch, Adam Preiser, Kim Shivler, and special guest Amanda McCoy joined host Jonathan Denwood for a lively discussion with plenty of links to resources to help you with your own site.

Amanda McCoy spoke at WordCamp Sacramento 2017 on color palette selection, so we invited her along to share some insights. She works in both web and print design, and likes to select colors that fit the project. If you take a look at her website, you’ll see what she means. Her portfolio shows plenty of examples where the colors set the tone of her message. She also says to keep it simple for your website. You only need a few colors.

Adam has several tutorials on fonts and colors. One of his pet peeves is when he can tell, at a glance, what WordPress theme people are using because they haven’t taken the time to change default fonts and colors.

The group also covered the difference between free fonts and copyrighted professional fonts. Make sure that you are using a free font or have paid the licensing fee if you are using a professional font.

Resources to help with fonts and color palettes:

Type wolf - a site dedicated to what’s happening in the world of type.
https://www.typewolf.com/

Font pair helps designers pair Google fonts.
http://fontpair.co

More Meaningful Typography by Tim Brown is an article explaining how to successfully use typography. It is published on the site A List Apart.
https://alistapart.com/article/more-meaningful-typography

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. A practical guide to web typography.
http://webtypography.net/

Practical Color Theory for People Who Code
https://tallys.github.io/color-theory/

Color in UI Design: A (Practical) Framewory by Erik D. Kennedy on Medium
https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/color-in-ui-design-a-practical-framework-e18cacd97f9e

Color Theory 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Complementary Colors, RGB, and More by Caroline Mercurio on Storyblocks
https://blog.storyblocks.com/tutorials/color-theory-101-a-beginners-guide/

Open Color - an open-source color scheme
https://yeun.github.io/open-color/