It’s nearing the end of September, and the change of season to Autumn hardly goes unnoticed. ‘Tis the season where we leave the patios and beaches behind and yield our afternoons to raking leaves off the front lawn.

At the car dealership down the street, all the display models are a rich olive shade. All the salespeople seem to have decided that forest green suits were all the rage.

Of course, art immitates life (or in this case, crass commercialism). Not that I’m saying the recent batch of well designed websites have been taking after the car salesmen from around the block, but they certainly have no trouble embracing the earth-tones and subtle shades and colours that Autumn seems to bring around.

Whether it’s in the backdrop (exhibit a, exhibit b), or peeking through with highlights and in the foreground (as per Adaptive Path, Jonathan Snook, Microformats, Otvice and Rodoula), earth-based tones of green and brown can catch the viewer’s eye, and keeping up with the season in terms of colour helps keep your site looking fresh. Whether it’s a high-saturiated green or darker olive with grey tones intermixed, adding an earth-tone to your colour pallette can is a look that is accomplished successfully wherever it’s used in balance with the rest of the site.

Some sites are making solid-looking sites based around green and grey shades, rather than just adding them in as highlights. When pulled off, this makes for a very nice colour pallette, and is very easy to work around for highlight shades.

Now, to get back to raking those leaves…

Share This

↑ Jump up to the comment form

The posts The Many Blessings of Fadtastic, From Counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, We have a friend! Presenting Design Deconstruct, Away and Bug Squashing, Big, Bold Backgrounds, are related to this post.

Or why not take time out to find out about the author of the post.