Colour Psychology

This is not an article about HTML and colour, this is an article about colour psychology and web design. My interest in colour psychology was sparked again in a conversation some days ago when I had a look at some web page design sites but found very little attention spent on colour psychology. Colours have symbolic meaning as well as influencing our thoughts and actions - using colour sends subliminal messages. So here are a few hints on areas to think about and some links to follow.

Name That Colour!

There are over 8000 different colors. Cocoa, SeaGreen, Firebrick, Shanpagne, Oakbrown, Rosewood, Bordeaux, and Scotchgray to name but a few. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica the human eye can distinguish some 10,000,000 of these different colours and their mixtures.

If You Can See It...

We don't all perceive colour in the same way. Some languages use one word for green and blue or for yellow and orange. Others have a variety of words for the one colour. Eskimos for example, use 17 words for white in the same way as they have 17 different words describing different snow conditions.

In general everyone has words for black and white. If a third hue is named it is usually red. Following that people tend to distinguish yellow, green, blue, brown, gray, orange, and purple are designated. In short, excluding grey, the colours needed to play pool! Is this a *mystic* connection? :-)

Symbolic Value

There are symbolic values associated with certain colours. But just to make things complicated, different cultures associate moods with different colours.

Take the colour white. It appears to be one of the neutral colours in web page design. But should you use it as a background to advertise your business? Not if your business is wedding oriented. For Buddhists white is the colour associated with mourning and Hindus too associate the colour with widowhood and unhappiness.

Take the colour black. In Western countries, black is associated with death and depression. Web pages dedicated to the occult often use black backgrounds associating the colour with the "darker side" of humanity.

On the Net black was the colour used in 1996 to protest the wording of the USA's "Communications Decency Act. Called Black Thursday, Netizens turned their pages black for 48 hours in support of the Coalition to Stop Net Censorship.
To read more about this controversy look at this and this.

Reactions to the colour blue include "cold", "heavenly", "clean" and "medicinal". Reactions to the colour red include "warm", "dangerous", "sexy" and "lucky". With these reactions in mind, think about your visitors cultural associations when choosing dominant colours for your web pages.

The Physical Side

Some colours are more taxing to look at than others. Bright colours reflect more light which sometimes over stimulates the eye. A page with a splash of light yellow or bright orange may attract the eye, but unrelieved light yellow and bright orange will be off putting as the eye becomes tired.

The eye is confused by contrasting colours. Placing the wrong colours next to each other might result in a "washed out" effect. For example, when there is not much light, blue and green appear brighter than reds of equal brightness.

Back in fashion.

New Age philosophy has become popular world-wide and with it  colour psychhology has come into fashion again as well.

The fashion industry has taken full advantage of the resurgance of this. For example, look at the Colour Me Beautiful fashion programme. As they proclaim " Within 60 seconds of meeting you, a person has "imprinted" their impression of you, your economic status, trustworthiness, education, competence and social standing, all within one minute! " With their help (at a price of course) you are guaranteed to be wearing the right colour to make that right impression!

Back to the point in question, web design and colour. If you've had a think about what colours you want to use on your site you may have some problem actually conveying these colours to others because of the shortcomings of the equipment you and they are using.

Our monitors appear to show a full range of colour. Three colours, Red(R), Green(G), and Blue(B), otherwise known as the primary colours of light, are combined to form those colours. From far we can't distinguish individual colours but look up close and you will see the individually coloured dots. This means that producing the colours we want may be more difficult than it seems.