Finance
1st edition — by Patrick McNeil — Jul. 3, 2007
The Site Type
The world of finance can be a difficult one to design for. There are countless samples of these sites with corny stock photos of some guy smiling at you pretending to be your friend. Somehow it only makes you feel more suspicious. This fresh set of finance sites aren't big banks so much as they are sites that deal with money in general. The real beauty of them of course is that they don't make you feel like your dealing with a shark right off the bat. I can't help but imagine that this is a tough hurdle for these types of companies to get over.
Certainly some of these sites have a bit more polish then others, and even a few silly stock photos have made there way into the designs. But overall the aesthetic is so far ahead of where things have been in the recent past. It seems these companies have embraced recent trends in web design and have attempted to fit in instead of languish in the past. Consider how the perception of a huge organization like the New York Times changes when they launch a modern web site. Suddenly their image is altered in significant ways. They are somehow cool again, so cool in fact that they show up in the new iPhone commercials. This sort of image is exactly what many financial institutions need. They need to present the perception of customer service and a focus on being up to date. Who wants to deal with a mortgage broker that is stuck in the 90's? Why would one think they could serve you effectively?
This set of sites raises the bar for the level of design in this particular industry. Hopefully other organizations will follow suit.
Sample Usage
Links
Genopal (Color pallet creation software)
COLOURlovers (Excellent color pallet collections)
Kuler - pallet builder from Adobe /
ColorBlender.com (The
best tool I have found for easily creating beautiful color pallets)
Great color browsing resource (Named colors, by hue, etc)
Color
Scheme Generator
Color
Blender (On MeyerWeb)
Color In Motion
Color Schemer Online v2
Color Schemer Gallery
Color Symbolism
