Author Website Inspiration: Winter Colors
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If you’re feeling worried about the color palette to use on your author website, I have good news for you:
99% of the time, as an author, your book cover(s) set the direction for the colors we should use.
This is one of the many reasons why it’s essential that you invest in a top quality cover, that you research your genre carefully, and that your cover designer truly nails it. A book cover that you’re thrilled with, which sends the perfect signals to your ideal reader, really is worth its weight in gold. After that, your visual branding gets much easier.
But although I generally recommend to my clients that we take inspiration from book covers, there are still times when it’s helpful to explore the subtle messages that website colors give. For this, I lean heavily on the work of Fiona Humberstone (aka The Brand Stylist), who has identified four seasonal personalities for business brands.
Knowing what your author brand stands for, and the key values you want to communicate about your work, is an important part of your publishing journey.
Winter brands, for example, give off vibes that are luxurious, assertive, strong, decisive, and uncompromising. While colors are not exclusively “icy” blues and “frosty” whites, they are clear and typically intense.
A fascinating distinction for winter brands is that this is the only season that should use pure black. Look carefully at the websites I design and you’ll see that the dark text is usually a very dark blue, green, or purple. Only rarely is it “pure” black, represented by the color hex code #000000. (A good friend once asked me for advice about her business rebrand, and I pushed her pretty hard to replace her intended black website font in favor of navy blue. It worked out beautifully, in the end.)
If all this leaves you a little mystified, I warmly recommend Humberstone’s book, How to Style Your Brand : it’s both beautiful and informative.
Or, schedule an author website consultation with me, and we’ll explore your brand season together.
Think your work might lend itself well to winter branding?
Here, for inspiration, are some of my client websites that sit more or less in the winter family of colors:
Thriller author: Leland Shipp
Novelist: Lucille N. Payne
Author and speaker: Jessica Nordell (project collaboration with Charlotte Duckworth Studio)
Speaker, author, and entrepreneur: Hughes Suffren
Romance author: Lēigh Tudor
In terms of genre: thrillers, science fiction, and dystopian novels can often lend themselves to a winter brand, but book club and literary fiction, business books, and many types of nonfiction can sit nicely here too. Each author has a unique way of telling their story or presenting their message, and that’s what I aim to communicate, when I create your ideal website.
For more seasonal inspiration, I also shared this autumn / fall inspiration collection, featuring more author websites I’ve worked on.
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