Colour: pick two

Open your website and count the colours. Not the photos — the interface: buttons, headings, links, backgrounds, icons, badges. If you get past four, your site has no colour scheme. It has a collection.

Colour works when it means something. On a page where one colour appears only on the thing you can tap, the eye learns it in a second and finds every button on every page without thinking. On a page where that same colour is also the heading, the icon and the footer, it means nothing, and the visitor has to read everything to find the action.

The rule

Two colours. One does the talking; one does the pointing.

• The brand colour carries the personality: headings, the logo, a background block, the moments you want to feel like you. Used generously but not everywhere.
• The action colour appears on exactly one kind of thing: the button people should press, and the links that matter. Nowhere else. Not in the icons, not in the heading, not in the decorative bar. If it appears elsewhere, it stops pointing.

Everything else is neutral — near-black text, near-white background, a couple of greys. Neutrals are not the absence of design. They are what makes the two colours loud.

Choosing them

The brand colour comes from who you are: the butcher's deep red, the clinic's calm blue, the bakery's warm cream. The action colour has one job — contrast. It has to stand out against the brand colour and against white and against a dark background, and it has to be readable with white or black text on top. That eliminates most pretty options and leaves a few that work. Pick from those; do not pick from the mood board.

Check both in dark mode, on a cheap phone, in sunlight. A colour that only works on a designer's monitor is a colour that only works in the pitch.

What goes wrong

• The rainbow of icons. Six services, six colours. It looks lively and communicates nothing; nobody remembers that blue means plumbing.
• Red for everything. Red is for stop, error, delete. A red "Buy" button next to a red "Cancel" is a coin toss.
• The gradient era. Gradients are lovely once, on the hero. On every button they turn to mush.
• Grey text on grey. Someone thought it looked elegant. Nobody could read it.

Why two is enough

Because the discipline is the point. A site with two colours looks decided. It photographs well, prints well, survives dark mode and stays consistent when the intern makes the Instagram post, because there is nothing to get wrong. Restraint reads as confidence, and confidence is what people are buying when they choose a business online.

Two colours, one of them for the button. Everything else is typography, and typography does most of the work anyway.