5 tips to design a corporate, but fun intranet

What does this actually mean, and how do you achieve such a thing?

Designing “corporate, but fun” intranets requires a clever balancing act. It’s very easy to go over the top one way or the other, and ruin the design altogether. Below are some of the things we think about when we design for both:

1. Keep the page background white.

It’s important to keep the background neutral. This way it won’t limit your use of imagery or color elsewhere. We sometimes use a background image to frame a white content area in fixed-width designs, but it’s important to ensure the background image isn’t too de-saturated or dark.

2. Keep the color palette simple and fonts to a minimum.

A two- or three-color palette is usually more than enough for an intranet. The more colors you use in your design, the more confused the theme of your intranet will be.

Intranets, unlike websites, contain multiple blocks of content that use the same colors. Therefore, intranets require fewer colors. We often use background colors and fonts to distinguish between or highlight certain blocks of content.