Designing interesting looking websites in greyscale, minimal tones?

Question

I know a business that wanted a website to match their brand, and it would seem that they are allergic to colour. I think designs in greyscale can look amazing, especially in print, but it feels near impossible to apply to website design. In this case, the business was centered around social networking and new technology but a greyscale design I feel is rather outdated and didn't reflect at all what they did, even though, apparently that was their brand. (They said they were going for that 'Apple like minimalism style and sophistication' but perhaps they were thinking of Apple ten years ago.) The business's website today is about as bland as cold white rice, like one of those warranty documents you get with a new gadget you bought. I recently received a request from a client who, for an architectural practice requested the same look and feel, without colour. What do think makes a website look modern and interesting while lacking colour?

Answer 1

This is very difficult concept for a Business website. Sure, for blogs and newspaper print articles a black on white page is acceptable, but you would need to draw the readers attention using bold, italic, and underlined text on the page.

One possibility to make it modern and yet grey would be the use of Bootstrap JavaScript features (i.e. Navigation can be done is grey, menu items, flyovers, and such). These make the site as modern as you can get.

For one, color adds helpful clues what is a link, what has been a visited link, and what is text on the page.If you remove color you are actually going to cause employees longer to find the information they need to get their jobs done.

Also, color allows a developer to draw attention to form fields that are required and what are optional. Validation is most often done by adding helper text in red on the form for any missing data.

Besides the obvious, the other drawback is some employees might be color blind and grey scale websites do not always meet 508 government compliance standards for the color blindness disabled folks.