Psychology of Colour - Are you easily influenced?

Community
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Do you think it’s a good idea to alter colours and their representations on the web? If we become so familiar with certain colours and their associations, should it really be changed? Isn’t that just making us a bit more confused or is it healthy to create a new outlook?

Whoa, talk about a great question.
I do have the tendency to think that more common understanding of suggested meaning is better, but leaving experimentation behind sounds wrong, although if I draw a parallel with written language, if every culture used the latin base of letters, it would be a lot easier to learn foreign languages like chinese (and vice-versa) but would result in less ideas and differences.

Or for example if every country in the world used the same written language, it would definitely result in less problems for everyone, but also cause less creativity/differences.
Same happens with colors, it’s also a language in a way, and everyone speaks their own.

To be honest, I don’t know, Let’s see what others have to say.

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I like to do a lot of studying in color psychology, and when I teach a class on design I would always bring it up.

The problem is it’s so imprecise. The biggest difference amongst it are between different colors. For example, take the color red. As someone mentioned, it has very different meanings. In the west it’s generally associated with anger (“seeing red”) and is a very intense, sometimes negative, color. However, in China it represents life and vitality, so it is a very positive color.

However, even from person to person there can be a lot of differences with color. Some of these responses are instinctual and part of our genes.

An example of this would be the color blue. Blue, in most people, is an appetite suppressing color. This could be a developed attribute because there is little to no natural food that is blue (mold and stuff is also often blue, which we shouldn’t eat), so it’s instinctual.

Likewise, orange is an appetite stimulant in many people, likely because so many orange-ish foods are very nutrient rich (citrus fruits, honey, etc.). I’ve noticed a lot of fast food places have started adopting orange/brown color schemes, likely for this reason.

There are also color psychology which is developed individually. For example, if you had a favorite purple teddy bear growing up as a kid, the color purple may become associated with happiness, safety, or comfort… which isn’t a traditional response. Or, you may have been attacked by someone wearing a yellow raincoat and it was traumatic, so you begin associating yellow (which is normally a happy color) with fear.

It’s something interesting that I keep in the back of my mind when I’m picking colors, but not something I rely on.

I generally go with sets of shades that have a specific appeal. For example, I worked on a natural medicine website not long ago. I chose beiges and natural shades of green to get a “natural” effect. Likewise, if I’m working on a website for cutting edge, I’ll use lots of darker or unnaturally-vibrant and bold colors to get a more “high tech” feel.

When considering the effect of a color scheme, versus individual colors, the reaction seems to be more consistent (though not always if you have certain colors that have a very opposing and strong meeting, like red).

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Often clients already have a colour scheme that they want to stick with, but I try to balance colours to give a pleasing effect.

I wrote a blog post about this - I found a really interesting article summarising research on colour associations with reference to web design.

The link to the original article is at the top of the post - it’s a good read but very long. I tried to summarise the main points.

Colour Associations for Web Designers « Cybertramp Web Design

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We all do… and so as color-blinded person. Colors in web design influences the Designer’s personality, professionalism and creativity. Some designers make websites depending on their mood.

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If you’re really interested in color - theory, psychology, how it relates to art, feeling, religion, philosophy, and so much more, I suggest reading:

The Art of Color by Johannes Itten (Bauhaus era).

It’s the definitive bible of color theory.

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Man that’s a pricey book, that means it must be good. :wink:

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It’s actually really easy to figure out. Study what the governments, politicians and big businesses use for different situations. Backgrounds of certain speeches, colors of ties, charity adverts, beauty products. If they are using the same situation for whatever reason they normally use the same colors.

Unfortunately we’ve been programmed to respond to these small changes, unfortunately to an extent where most dismiss it

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It’s about 200 pages of color theory! Amazon.com: The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color (0723812289288): Johannes Itten: Books.

Itten was the professor of color theory at the Bauhaus (the greatest art school in the history of mankind). The book delves into depths of color theory most people haven’t even considered (e.g. religion).

He also created a “cliff notes” version called “Elements of Color” which is significantly smaller and cheaper, and expresses the same general concepts in a less verbose and philosophical manner.

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@transio
That definitely got me interested, will try and get my hands on that book now, or at least the cheaper one.

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It does look good. I just dropped about $70 yesterday on a few design books (Web Designers Idea Book Vol 1 and 2 and Logo Design Love). I don’t even do design anymore really (I’m a developer =p), so it’s hard to justify another $70 right now… but I’m gonna put it on my wish list for later. =)

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Yeah, with books, I prefer to go for the classics rather than one-liner contemporary books that have content you can find in 100 blogs for free and will be out of date in a couple years… some of my other favorite “non-web-design” books that apply well to web design:

Ogilvy on Advertising
The Psychology of Everyday Things
The Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy

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Off Topic:

Some of those sound like good for usability too.

The books I ordered I ordered mainly because they have lots of pwetty pictures. =D Just something to flip through when I’m looking for an idea. It’s not really for -learning- anything (though from the reviews I probably will =)).

(Figured I should wrap this in an off-topic. =p)

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I’d say yes for sites that have no business in adhering to the norm. Fashion sites are one example. Designers’ sites or niche sites, like a font foundry, extreme sports sites, web/mobile app sites, gaming sites, are other examples where a design can be more daring in terms of breaking some design conventions. For other sites, e.g. a news site or a travel site, I’d stick to proven concepts for the most part in terms of color branding.

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Do you think there are color “standards” for branding things like news sites? The 4 news sites I visit (CNN.com, MSNBC.com, WSJ.com, and MiamiHerald.com) each use unique color palettes.

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Transio, I’d say, yes, there are color standards for news sites. I’m trying to think of a news site that does not make use of either of these colors. It’s almost always a combination of blues, greens, and reds. I’ve rarely seen a news site making use of pink, purple, brown, yellow, orange, etc. unless it targets a special niche/topic. I’m not saying these sites don’t exist. I’m sure they do, but the majority stick to these colors, at least that’s been my experience.

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I can’t really argue with that… though Blue, Green, and Red is a pretty wide gamut of colors.

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I think something to remember when choosing colors is to relate to the outside world rather than too much in the cyberworld.

For example if your website is a blog or perhaps even a forum like this it’s good to have a whitish background as people normally write on white paper and read from books printed on white paper. If it’s a football website perhaps have two prominent colors which take dominance over different pages as fans can associate ‘home’ and ‘away’ kits. All these things are picked up by our middle brain.

Colors like yellow are always used by royals, pinks by powerful women trying to look softer but it really is as easy as just looking around a bit.

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Color of the websites influence every one. Dull and very dark color not liked many people. For a good website the color should be light and the layout of the webpage should be proportional with respect to various different panes. Web page should have enough white space. Now days there is color scheme selector software which selects a good color for our sites.

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Colors sometimes depend on the genre of the website you are creating isn’t it ?

Like children’s website need to use bright colors, website dealing with nature maybe green color etc

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I can see that there are subtle colour influences going on within Hazel’s signature that seem very soothing. So I can tell it’s a subject she has a great deal of interest in; perhaps there is some use of colour psychology there too.