Design with Flying Colours (Page 2)

And the Time for a McDonald’s Came

The forum member then showed me a draft which was bothering him. You can see it here. He then asked:

Aside from making a point about the use of Comic Sans, which doesn’t agree with the design of this draft, I proceeded with an example on how colour has been used on McDonald’s site. Have a look at the screen shots of some of the McDonald’s pages below.

McDonald’s USA home page

McDonald’s Food Nutrition & Fitness page

McDonald’s Sports page

McDonald’s logo, as we know, is yellow, the “ballons” are red. But there are a lot of cool colours (cool meaning cold). If they did everything red, readers might start having high pressure problems…

Notice how much blue there is, though on other pages of the site there is less of it, but it’s there. The background is white. It gives the site a “chillier” feel. Red is used in smaller quantities and it strikes that way. Aside from blue, red is on every page and so is yellow.

Considering that blue is complementary to yellow, and McDonald’s logo itself is yellow, then yellow is the key colour. Yes, there is more blue than yellow, but that is because when you put together those colours, you actually need less yellow than you need blue to have a balanced colour combination.

You only actually see “dabs” of red either in the pictures or in the ballons, and these dabs strike. If you look at the colour wheel, you’ll notice that red is a triadic of yellow. If you were to use too much red, you’d get a clash instead of an impact.

Further suggestions were:

• Make the background white
• Take off the orange starbust behind the writing
• The “much bigger than you think” line to be adjusted—instead of scaling the font to be taller, make the word “bigger” of a considerably… bigger size and possibly make it bold. This adds contrast and really brings home that the burger is “bigger”, compared to what the person thinks (“than you think” is written in smaller letters.)
• To make the yellow logo stand out from the white background do the same thing that McDonalds does on their white bags, which you can see in this page.
• Rearrange the elements on the page, even if just to make sure they align to each other a bit better and lead the eye through the message, without leaving it wondering around the page.