Tag Archive for: Onextra Pixel

Pantone Red

Colors do more than most people give them credit for. In web design, they aren’t just physically helping define a page. They can set a mood, establish trust, excite viewers, and define your brand. Colors can help a company secure their professional image or severely damage it. Colors can be out of date, and they can be hip or trendy.

The key to understanding how colors function is to understand how we think about and respond to those colors. Onextra Pixel has been exploring colors and offering guides to help us understand the use of color in web design.

Red is a color with perhaps the strongest associations, possibly because it is such a bright, attention grabbing color. It is such a dominant color, it seems to always be extroverts favorite color.

These associations tend to be dramatic connections. Red is normally associated with passion, danger, sacrifice, blood, passion, fire, beauty, and anger. In contrast, in many cultures the color is associated with happiness and love.

Because of these dramatic associations, red is one of the most powerful colors for expressing moods or grabbing attention in all types of media. It encourages appetite, inspires activity, and evokes emotion all depending on the shade used. Pale shades like pink can be soft and feminine, while pure bright reds can be harsh, aggressive, and overbearing. Meanwhile, deep dark shades of red like crimson can evoke warmth and comfort or creepy sinister vibes.

As you can see, red is one of the most versatile colors on the spectrum. If you can choose the right shade for your design, you can create heightened emotion and attention with ease. Or, you can pair it with white and black to create a formal, professional perception.

Due to its incredible versatility red is obviously a popular color on the web and in all other kinds of design. Onextra Pixel has a showcase of websites using red in many different ways to portray a huge variety of moods and emotions.

Everything Design

Source: Everything Design

Flat design has officially become commonplace, but it is hard to tell how long its offspring, long shadow design, will last. At first glance, it seemed long shadow design would just be a small isolated derivative from the popular flat style, but it seems to have taken on a life of its own by providing a sense of depth while still maintaining a flat and minimal aesthetic.

For those who have yet to run into the style, it is characterized by appearing largely similar to flat design, but with a 45 degree angle that extends much further than any standard dropshadow would. Onextra Pixel estimates the shadow is around 2.5 times the size of the object normally.

If you want proof of long shadow design’s spread through the web design community, look no further than the number of free resources being released to make implementation quick and easy. Onextra Pixel has highlighted two over the past week alone, and there are many more included in theirs and other sites’ weekly round-ups of resources.

The first resource is a simple set of icons created by Christopher Behr that cover all you basic needs from music, settings, messaging, mail, and social media icons. They are all clearly inspired by the Apple icon style, while bringing long shadow aesthetics to the table.

The other free offering comes from a Bucharest based design and development studio called Responsive. They are giving away a complete long shadow flat UI kit which will make development a breeze.

Who knows if long shadow design is going to pass out of favor in the coming months, but it is currently riding high on the back of flat design. It certainly offers a solution to flat design’s complete rejection of depth while still providing a sleek and clean design.

Long Shadow UI Kit