Color In Design: Pink
Last week, I wrote about the earthy color brown in design. This week we’re looking at the more flamboyant color pink. While red is linked with passion, pink is associated with love and romance. It is a stylish color and while generally considered feminine, it’s not just for girls! Are you man enough to wear Pink? Pink is a trendy and playful and is surprisingly popular in web design.
Think of the use of pink in everyday language and you can see how it is perceived as mostly a positive color. A healthy person is sometimes referred to as “In the pink”, content and happy people are described as “tickled pink”.
Using Pink In Design:
There are of course, many different shades and hues of pink. Ranging from light pinks, into orange-pinks, into deep pinks, the color has names such as fuchsia, rose, salmon, flesh, coral and hot pink. There is a pink for every occasion.
You can create soft and delicate color palettes using light pink with pastel purples. Pink combined with black or dark grey can look sophisticated. Pink and blue is playful and fun, while dark pinks combined with burgundy can create a more serious tone. Salmon pink and moss green produce a natural, earthy combination.
Magazine covers are a great place to see pink palettes in action. In this Harper’s Bazaar cover, Gwyneth Paltrow is wearing a dark pink dress. The type is all set in one typeface, but the bright pink matches text matchers her lipstick. Salmon pink and white text add to the palette.
On the Rolling Stone cover below, Alicia Silverstone’s clothes are almost the same color as the background. The pink is very soft. However, the black type and choice of typeface stops it from going into pink girly overkill.
There’s quite a sixties vibe going on with this cover of V Magazine. Lady Gaga’s hot pink clothes and ehm, glasses combined with the bright yellow text and bright orange background are very much in your face and leap off the page.
Famous Logos And Branding Using Pink
As with the brown logos last week, I found it hard to think of more than a handful really well known logos using pink as a major color. One logo which came to mind quickly is the disaster that is the London 2012 logo. It must be working so. Please feel free to add the list.
Pink In Web Design
I’ve picked out ten sites that I thought were doing a great job in pink. These sites either use pink to highlight important areas of the web site, or use it as an eye-catching background color.
What do you think about pink? Is pink your color or something that makes you want to run away from a site? Any other pink sites that you like?
