#971226 is my colour in the web

This month’s IndieWeb Carnival is hosted by Marisabel who chose a theme of colours.

I’m not much of a designer. Over the years, I’ve ended up doing a lot of graphic design for someone with my level of skills: websites, event posters and ads and blog graphics to name a few.

One thing I’ve learned is that if your skills are limited, it’s better to keep things simple than trying to be smart with it. That’s bit of an oxymoron though because it’s often harder to design something simple than something complex.

My simple set of designs for myself revolve around the color #971226. If you’re viewing this website on a light theme, it’s the ruby red colour you see as my accent colour on this website:

The colour has really grown onto me. I didn’t select it based on any creative brainstorming session or market research: the free HTML template I started with when building this site had a different shade of red and I wanted to change it to something bit darker for improved contrast and it stuck with me.

I do a lot of talks in events and I love making slides that are colourful and full of pictures but I also have a backup template based on my website’s colours and fonts that I can use if I need to put something together quickly. I’ve used it on a few technical talks and it looks like this:

If you’re a regular (or even occasional but have done it more than a few times) visitor and you’ll later see the slides on a talk, you can make the connection that there’s a stylistic similarity and your brain can make the connection between the two. It’s a small, subtle thing but that’s what any kind of branding essentially boils down to.

Recently, until this summer, I’ve written a lot of CVs and job applications and for them, I have a Pages template that follows the same visual style. In it, I also have links to my website so if someone reads my CV, my application and ends up visiting my site, there’s a clear connection between all of them. Consistent style with pre-made templates helps me create small moments where people who interact with what I do, recognise them as mine.

(I similarly use #E19157 — Persian orange — as my accent colour for all of my dark theme versions on my sites but it hasn’t quite grown onto me as much as this ruby red has.)