Perspicacious and insightful response, Bob! Thank you!

The studies are true. Color theory has a lot to teach us, and should be learnt and understood… but color practice is much different: Designers take color theory’s findings to mean that users will understand the meaning of colors, and they love love love coming up with a complex scheme for color-coding things. That, in my experience, doesn’t work.

Color’s effects are at the non-verbal, non-rational layer of thinking, not at the layer of meaning and intellect. Yes, different colors have different effects, but if you expect the end-user to be consciously aware of these effects, and to internalize an intellectual understanding of the color scheme, you’re fooling yourself.

I am, of course, exaggerating a bit. In reality, green-orange-red works relatively well for expressing “good-warning-danger”… but when designers push it to mean “approved-pending-incomplete”, for instance, then it breaks down. Colors work well to induce emotional states, but they don’t work to communicate abstract status. That’s why I say they’re meaningless.

Does that make sense?