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Importance_of_Color_in_Web_Design
| Importance of Color in Web Design
There’s more to websites than just images and text. A website
is a marketing tool, representing the company, owner, employees
and products. Beyond that, it is a personality. A website is a
personality? Yes. It portrays a positive or negative symbolism
and/or emotion.
In a face-to-face meeting our bodies and faces portray unspoken
meanings. We smile, gesture, laugh, and become nervous. It’s
these little nuances that help us communicate. A website does
exactly the same thing. The difference is: a website does it
with color. Colors themselves contain a cornucopia of meaning.
They can make us happy, sad, angry, comfortable, nervous, and
even trusting. While it seems simple enough to choose a graphic
and then design a site around that graphic, you may
unintentionally be presenting a derogatory impression. The
colors may contradict the content in unintended ways.
Colors and their meanings Green and white work well together,
but in Japan a white carnation signifies death and a green hat
in China means a man’s wife is cheating on him. A green hat with
a white carnation in the brim wouldn’t be a good choice for a
company logo. However, green is the easiest color on the eye; it
has a calming effect which is why it is most used in hospitals.
It relaxes the patients. Different shades of green have
different meanings: yellow-greens are the least preferred colors
by consumers.
Red has been shown to increase blood pressure and heart rate.
People working in a red environment work faster, but they also
make more mistakes. It increases appetite, restlessness and
nervous tension. Creating a site with bright red and bright blue
is a very poor idea! Bright red has the longest wavelength and
bright blue has the shortest. When viewing these colors the
human lens has to adjust to focus, and it tries to focus on
both. This tires the eyes very quickly and will give the viewer
a headache.
Websites that contain different shades of blue, or a blue and
white combination tend to be more popular. Why? Blue represents
calm, stability, hope, wisdom and generosity. People inherently
trust blue websites faster. Add blue text and people will retain
more information from your site. Combine blue, purple, and white
and you have nobility.
Thankfully you do not see many yellow sites. While yellow can
increase concentration, it is the hardest on the eyes. Paint a
room yellow and you will make babies cry and adults lose their
temper. Yellow is a very spiritual color and eye catching. Used
in small amounts it is very inviting, cheerful and the number
one attention getter. Forget blinking animations, just use a
small, nicely designed yellow graphic.
Let’s talk orange for a minute. As a fruit, I love it. As a
color, I don’t love it. It always reminds me of Jell-O and that
reminds me that the EEG of Jell-O is the same as the human
brain. Orange does have its pluses though. It tends to make more
expensive products seem affordable and suitable for everyone,
almost like a natural sales pitch. Brighter orange is hard on
the eyes and is not recommended for text or background images.
Small amounts of bright orange can help create a “fun and
interesting” site.
Action and Reaction Color affects how we feel, our perceptions,
and our interactions. A visitor has already made a conscious
choice to visit your site, now you have to keep his or her
interest. You have between 8 to 10 seconds to visually appeal to
the surfer. Through color you can make a surfer feel welcome,
comfortable, relaxed, and trusting. If you take existing
graphics on a site and change the color you change the way the
site is perceived, thus changing a person’s reaction.
Taking a water-based product and placing it on a purple or
orange site decreases marketability. Purple and orange are not
immediately associated with water or nature and will give the
site and product a “false” impression. Placing that same product
on a blue or green site will increase the desire for that
product. While we naturally associate water with the colors blue
and green, not all site designs adhere to this thought process.
Sites that are nature related receive better responses when
multiple colors of green are used then any other color or
combination.
Multi-colored sites, or “rainbow sites,” have the lowest
visitation time. This is not the case if the site is
predominantly white, while displaying only small amounts of
various colors. As the multiple colors decrease, the time of
visitation increases. Sites aimed at children, such as toy
sites, often use a wide range of color to “entertain” the
visitor. While this is smart marketing, displaying large
quantities of multiple colors decreases the “fun” aspect as the
eye tries to focus and concentrate on the overly busy page. A
smart rule of thumb when using multiple colors: do not use more
than 5 colors, keep them either “warm” or “cool,” and make the
background white. Fun is more fun when it is easy on the eyes.
Warm and Cool Colors Warm colors are based on yellows, oranges,
browns, yellow-greens, and orange-reds, colors commonly
associated with fall or autumn. Generally, warm colors tend to
be more exciting and aggressive. Many people prefer them in
small doses. Purples and greens are intermediary colors, being
either warm or cool, depending on how much red or yellow they
contain in relation to blue. If the color contains less blue
then it is more likely to be a warm hue.
Cool colors are based on blues, greens, pinks, purples,
blue-greens, magentas, and blue-reds, colors more commonly
associated with spring and summer. Cool colors are soothing,
calming colors and tend to be more popular than warm colors.
Creating a site with a combination of warm and cool colors
confuses the viewer. It will often make the site seem busy,
dirty, and untrustworthy. Site designers do not always realize
that their color combinations are warm and cool. The use of a
color wheel can be helpful. It shows the Primary (red, yellow,
and blue) and Secondary (orange, green, and purple) colors.
Combining two primary colors creates secondary colors. All
colors are made from some combination of white, black, and the
primary colors.
What does all of this mean to site designers? If you want your
site to be marketable, remember that there is more to it than
just graphic placement and text. Every color tells a story and
it may not always fit the one you are trying to portray. In
informational design, distinguish functional color from
decorative color. Decorative color enhances the layout by making
it more aesthetically appealing, creating a mood, or
establishing a style. Functional color conveys information
explicitly.
Last, but not least, a few rules of thumb Make sure the choice
of colors for a site fits the intended content, and the users’
expectations. Never use more colors than are necessary. Do not
use colors that do not support or add to the information being
displayed. Remain consistent throughout the site with your color
choices, and leave the rainbows for rainy days and for chasing
pots of gold.
About the author:
W.L. Wilder is a Website Psychologist and owner of Critical
Thinking (http:www.thinkingcritically.net}.
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