The Psychology Of Color

Color is arguably one of the most important aspects of branding and marketing. Different colors have different psychological associations, depending on which you use to attract your target audience. This article will teach you about some of these color psychology principles to successfully market yourself or your product using colors. Color psychology is the study of how colors affect people. This book looks at how color affects us and our reactions to specific colors.  Conversion rates may be influenced significantly by color and visual cues. For example, on Quick Sprout, the Hellobar – a red bar at the top of the page — contributes to 11% of all new leads. KimberlySnyder.net is in the same boat, with a bright red Hellobar accounting for almost 20% of her income. This tool isn’t beautiful. It seems to be an eyesore on several pages. However, it sticks out. Because of this, internet viewers have short attention spans. They’re tearing up the internet (and digesting information at a million miles an hour). The only way to get their attention is to stand out among all the other things vying for it. This is where the use of color comes into play. Color has a significance that goes beyond aesthetics. We all have preferences, but why do we have them? The answer to that question will directly impact your conversion optimization and internet marketing strategy. We are constantly surrounded by color, yet we seldom consider how it affects us. We’re going to overthink things in this chapter. The following 20+ pages will cover everything you’ve ever wanted to know about color.

Theory of Color

Choosing colors that complement one another is a science. There is a certain amount of subjectivity involved (cultural, generational viewpoints, and personal preferences), but psychologists and designers will adhere to best practices. Color is broken down into the following framework by user experience designer Colm Tuite.

1. Pures, Tints, Shades, and Tones are all types of pures, tints, shades, and tones.

• UNIQUE COLOR

These are colors that haven’t been blended with others. They’re often used in vivid designs. Pure colors may assist anything young, sunny, joyful, lively, or ‘cool.’

• TINTS

These are colors that have been combined with white. They give off a softer, calmer, and less energizing vibe than pure hues. They are also seen to be more feminine. These hues might benefit businesses in the health, spa, and beauty sectors.

• SHADES

These are colors that have been blended with black and are used to convey mysterious, gloomy, wicked, or dangerous emotions. When combined with a pure color or a lighter shade, shades may work nicely with gradients.

2. Colors and Their Meanings.

Certain hues have cultural, emotional, and societal implications. Here are some of the Western world’s color meanings.

Color may be influenced by tints and hues, which can portray different emotions. A deeper shade of blue, for example, would indicate greater security and honesty. On the other hand, more serenity and peace would be conveyed by highlighter blue tones, which would get more stability, and harmony in colors has acquired a specific connotation through time (i.e., a branding effective). The Catholic Church, for example, favors rich purple and scarlet colors that have spiritual significance. Pink has also come to symbolize femininity. Countries have also adopted certain hues (for instance, Ireland and green).

3. Simplicity is essential.

When dealing with colors, it’s easy to make the error of using too many. It’s usually best to choose a single bold color balanced off with a neutral hue like white, gray, or black. When you employ too many colors, you risk confusing the individual looking at your design by sending too many sentiments or messages all at once.

4. Contrast.

For the most part, dark hues are excellent complements to bright colors. As a result, most books have white backgrounds with black lettering. Each color is assigned a contrast value (whiteEach color is assigned a contrast value. Lightweights may be found in yellow and green (so they would be difficult to read on a white background).

• Example

Imagine a customer coming to your (fictitious design) firm searching for a logo. The business is a spa that employs natural, organic materials. She’s aiming for a female audience, and she wants to send a serene message rather than an enthusiastic one. As a result, she understands that tints are the ideal option rather than pure colors or hues. Pink, yellow, purple, and blue are colors that portray serenity and tenderness.

The customer is particularly interested in emphasizing that the items are organic. Green is one possibility since it conjures up images of freshness and the environment. The following shade of green, on the other hand, is not very feminine:

As a result, the hue would have to be a bit lighter.

If you want to communicate a sense of calm, a touch of blue might be appropriate.

Conversions and Color

Here are some short statistics on how color influences conversions:

• 92.6 percent of individuals feel the visual component is the most crucial aspect in deciding whether or not to buy anything (over taste, smell, etc.).
• According to studies, consumers subconsciously decide about a thing within 90 seconds of first seeing it. Furthermore, up to 90% of that evaluation is based only on color.
• According to one research, full-color advertisements are recognized 26 percent more frequently than black-and-white ones by magazine readers.
• Heinz altered the color of its distinctive ketchup from red to green, selling nearly 10 million bottles in the first seven months for a total of $23 million in sales.

Here are some more details on how color influences buying choices. :

• When it comes to promoting new items, it’s crucial to remember that customers prioritize ahen it comes to shopping.
• Color is a significant moti for shoppingvator for 85 percent of customers when purchasing a product.
• Color can boost brand awareness by up to 80%. In addition, consumer confidence is strongly linked to brand awareness.
• In nature, colors are not ubiquitous. The colors that allure people in North America are not the same as those that draw people in India. See how various colors affect online shoppers in North America in the infographic below.
• Consumer behavior is influenced by more than just color: design, keywords, and convenience all influence the desire to purchase for online customers.

Color has a huge psychological and physical impact on humans. According to psychologists, color perception may account for 60% of a product’s or service’s acceptance or rejection. In addition, poor text or sluggish website load times may have the same user experience repercussions as a terrible color combination.

Gender

We’ve discussed ender in the previous parts, but we think it’s vital to mention it again. Your audience is made up of a mix of men and women at any one moment. We’ll say 50/50 for the sake of argument, but the fact is that this ratio varies based on your company and sector. If you’re not cautious, you might lose up to 50% of your website traffic and conversions (and develop gender-centric marketing graphics). We perceive the world as people in our daily lives. Instead of viewing the world through the eyes of consumers, we need to see it through the eyes of marketers. A color is no longer an option for marketing to individuals who aren’t like us. Gender correlations with color are uncertain in general, according to the study. Some experts have made the following observations:

• Eysenck’s study of color research from the early 1940s reveals the following findings on the gender-color link. Yellow has a more substantial emotional value for males than for women, according to Dorcus (1926), while blue shines out significantly more for men than for women, according to St. George (1938).
• In earlier research, Jastrow (1897) discovered that males liked blue to red while women preferred red to blue. However, there was just one gender difference in Eysenck’s analysis, with women choosing yellow to orange and males desiring orange to yellow. Birren (1952) confirmed this result, finding that males preferred orange to yellow while women put orange at the bottom of the list.
• Guilford and Smith (1959) discovered that males were more accepting of achromatic hues than women. As a result, Guilford and Smith hypothesized that women are more color-conscious, with more flexible and diversified color preferences. Similarly, McInnis and Shearer (1964) discovered that women over males preferred blue-green and that women chose tints overshades. They also found that cold colors were favored by 56 percent of men and 76 percent of women, whereas bright colors were favored by 51 percent of men and 45 percent of women. Plater (1967) discovered that males prefer greater chromas than women incomparable research.

It’s crucial to remember that cultural and social circumstances are constantly changing. You won’t be able to please everyone with just one color scheme since there is so much diversity in the population. You may study all the psychological research you want, but if you spend your time striving to be perfect, you’ll never get anything done. What’s the easiest method to tell whether your marketing discriminates against men and women? Speak with individuals in your target market. Investigate the color schemes that your rivals use. Don’t rely on guesswork, but don’t get too caught up trying to get the “correct” answer (because you won’t). Your data has the best solution. Make sure you’re executing frequent A/B testing and conducting qualitative research with your target clients.

Accessibility

Keep in mind that your viewers have varied perspectives on the world while developing your website. The world does not have perfect eyesight, even if you do. The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility effort has compiled a list of tools to assist website owners in making their sites accessible to persons with impairments. This article will assist you in establishing color checkpoints for accessible colors.

1. Brightness

For this debate, rightness is defined as the amount of light that illuminates an item. The arithmetic mean of the red, green, and blue color coordinates may be determined. To calculate color brightness, the W3C recommends using the following formula:

((RED X 299) + (GREEN X 587) + (BLUE X 114))/1000 = BRIGHTNESS

A visible color should have a brightness of at least 125.

2. Differences in Color

Color difference refers to the difference in hue between your website’s foreground and background colors. Here’s a formula to assist you to figure out how much color difference there is:

MAX(RED FOREGROUND, RED BACKGROUND) -MIN RED = MAX(RED FOREGROUND, RED BACKGROUND) RED = MAX(RED FOREGROUND (RED FOREGROUND, RED BACKGROUND)

MAX(GREEN FOREGROUND, GREEN BACKGROUND) -MIN GREEN = MAX(GREEN FOREGROUND, GREEN BACKGROUND) -MIN (GREEN FOREGROUND, GREEN BACKGROUND)

MAX(BLUE FOREGROUND, BLUE BACKGROUND) -MIN BLUE = MAX(BLUE FOREGROUND, BLUE BACKGROUND) -MIN (BLUE FOREGROUND, BLUE BACKGROUND)

= (RED) + (GREEN) + (YELLOW) (BLUE)

If the color difference between the background and foreground is more than 500, the background and foreground colors are apparent.

3. The Thumb Rules

Start by following these recommended practices to ensure that your website is accessible:

• Make sure the text sizes are big enough to read. While this suggestion has nothing to do with color, it is crucial to remember. Color, in the end, isn’t a stand-alone idea; it interacts with other components of your website, adverts, and landing pages.
• Short paragraphs make the material easier to assimilate (and readers don’t feel like they’re staring at a large block of color).
• Between your backdrop and foreground, use complementary yet contrasting colors. A color wheel may determine which colors would work well together.

Importance in Sales

You’re not only picking colors for aesthetics when it comes to your website, landing pages, and call to action buttons. Ren Walker of AdPearance has created a graphic that shows how colors are used in the context of the call to action buttons in the Western world:

Wow. That’s a lot of possibilities. Which one do you think you should pick? Even if you’re a color psychology specialist, picking just one hue for a form button, for example, might be difficult. What if you want to instill a feeling of urgency while still instilling trust? The most critical factor to consider when narrowing down your selections is in the context of your form. What kind of information do you want to gather? If the prospective lead requires personal information beyond basic contact information, a relaxing hue like green or blue may be appropriate. You should also think about the remainder of your page’s design. On a website with the same color scheme, a red button, for example, will blend in. Make your call to action (CTA) buttons stand out on your landing pages by using contrasting colors.

1. Getting the Attention of the Audience

Take, for example, this well-known A/B test:

When Performable, an email marketing tool bought by HubSpot, changed the color of its call to action button from green to red, it saw a 21 percent increase in conversions. The context of the CTA has everything to do with the color change. The left-hand page is heavily influenced by a green color scheme. The green CTA mixes in with the rest of the page’s design. Red, on the other hand, creates a stark visual contrast. The button stands out among the rest of the page’s components.

Affecting Website Elements

Stephanie Hamilton compiled a detailed list of website features influenced by color in a blog post for CrazyEgg:

1. Text Hyperlinks

Giving monochromatic links a thin backdrop to lift them off the page is one way to bring attention to them. This strategy aids in reminding viewers of their current location on your website. When the user is on the page, AppZapper creates the “overview” link by highlighting it in green.

2. Navigation

Bronto’s website navigation is highlighted by rich colors. This helps draw the reader’s attention to this crucial (but minor) section of the page.

3. Buttons

Make your website’s call to action (CTA) buttons stand out from other components by using different colors. Your users will be better able to grasp what activities they should do on your website if you utilize large, colorful buttons.

4. Headings

Headings that are bright (but not too bright) might assist to highlight the most significant information you’re attempting to express on your website.

5. Item List

You may utilize colors in a manner that doesn’t overpower the rest of your page’s design to bring attention to a certain feature or part of your website.

Complement the personality of your company

Brand personality is a notion we’ve discussed before in this book. Color allows you to express yourself in a strong way. Make use of colors to highlight your current brand identification, and make sure your style is consistent. Color is simply one component of your branding equation, and it must eventually compliment your voice, persona, tone, and corporate values. The following are the measures that we recommend marketers take:

1. Choose the feelings you wish to express.

This choice will aid you in deciding which color(s) to use and whether or not you’ll need to combine them with others. You’ll need to choose a color scheme from the selections below:

• Monochromatic: use just colors from the same color family (such as brown or blue)
• Use two or three hues that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel in a similar way.
• Complementary: Choose two hues on the color wheel that are opposite each other.
• Choose three colors that are evenly spaced across the color wheel.

2. Select a color scheme that best reflects your company’s personality.

Warm and inviting Browns Browns to conjure us images of home, hearth, warmth, and comfort. To create a soothing atmosphere, mix various tones of brown with grays or blues.

Greens that are fun to play with considering employing a palette of greens, blues, and oranges if your brand is lively or dynamic. This color combination has a nice, earthy tone as well as a lot of energy.

The Blues Are Serious Blues are both soothing and somber. You may include gray, tan, or orange into your color scheme, but secondary colors should be kept to a minimum to avoid overwhelming your audience with a chaotic appearance and feel.

Reds with a lot of energy Reds give you a boost of energy. However, if you’re not cautious, you can overwhelm your audience. Give your users lots of white space to rest their eyes.

Understand Your Specialty

Your industry heavily influences the color design and brand personality of your website. A financial website, for example, should be straightforward. If you stray too far from the established route, you risk confusing or producing cognitive dissonance with your consumer base. Here are a few color schemes that perform well for financial websites:

This color scheme is based on greens often associated with financial organizations. The gold adds a splash of color, while the black establishes a solid and authoritative base for the design. This is a striking color combination for a financial company since it extends beyond the apparent connotation of money (green). Gold and black help to enhance the idea of riches while also providing a feeling of security. A ‘cool’ color palette using typical finance colors (green and blue) is shown below:

The brand ties itself with the banking industry in a manner that seems current and young rather than heavy and oppressive by employing these colors in lighter, brighter values. In addition, the website has a clean, cheerful vibe because of the utilization of white space. This particle white space utilization relies on user trust to generate revenue.

Conclusion

We could honestly speak about color for hours, but there are still many other things we need to cover in this tutorial. So now is an excellent opportunity to take a step back and reflect on the essential topics we’ve covered so far and prepare our minds for what’s ahead.

• Choosing colors that complement one another is a science. The most fundamental color variants you’ll deal with are pure colors, tints, and shades. In addition, be aware of the emotions and moods that your colon addition selections are likely to elicit.
• Colors have social and cultural significance. When considering how your color selections will affect your audience, keep your frame of reference in mind.
• Keep in mind that various individuals will view your information from different angles. For example, eyeballs aren’t made any differently than other body parts. Some of us have excellent eyesight, while others find it difficult to see information on a computer screen. By utilizing contrasting colors, you can ensure that your content is simple to read.
• The hues red and green are the most impacted by vision loss, particularly in males. Therefore, when dealing with these hues, be cautious.
• ConverTherefore, when rates may be boosted with the use of color. Choose hues that stand out from the rest of your color palette when constructing your CTAs. Your visual signals will stick out because of their assertiveness. Remember that Internet users have short attention spans and are erratic. You’ll have an easier job engaging them if you can (immediately) grab their attention.
• Your conversion optimization method should include A/B testing. Rather than discussing which colors to use, let the facts decide.
• Pay attention to your industry’s typical color palettes. You risk producing cognitive dissonance among your audience if you pick anything too out-of-the-box. People will have no idea what your brand is about, in other words.
• Keep in mind that hue might be influenced by gender. Choosing blues and greens is one approach to be safe (and appeal to a broad audience).
• Consumers are greatly influenced by aesthetic appeal while purchasing new items. Make no compromises when it comes to color, and therefore, professional designers and branding experts can assist you in determining what blends well and what doesn’t. Everything should, in the end, suit your brand’s identity.
• Color may be used to draw attention to specific components on your website (like navigation, lists, certain buttons of content, etc.).
• Color can boost brand awareness by up to 80%. So pick color palettes that will stick with you (but for the right reasons). A well-chosen color palette can make your brand stand out.
• If you’re unsure, ask your consumers what they like. Then, take a look at the colors used by companies that target a similar demographic. There are so many free and inventive materials available that you’ll never go. Color is a powerful tool that can influence and impact human behavior. The “psychological effects of color on human behavior” is an academic paper that discusses the psychology behind colors concerning human behavior.

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