Color theory is so fundamental to design everywhere because of our ability to differentiate different frequencies of lightwaves is the reason we are able to see different colors. We can obviously get philosophical about whether if my version of red is the same as your version of red. But it’s well known that certain colors, shades evokes different sentiments in people that are pretty much uniform.
Moods
Let’s check out some of the various moods that are attributed to different colors and how you can use different colors to achieve different ends.
- Red
This is traditionally associated with love, energy, intensity. You can see a lot of car adverts that use red as one of their primary colors in the color palette. The reason is it’s meant to be exciting, its meant to be fast and it conveys that intensity that people look for in fast cars.
Ads trying to sell something related to love you will notice the color red being used predominantly in their color palette.
It’s really helpful analyzing adverts because these are really well thought out experiments in persuasion and manipulating human psychology. Advertising agencies are essentially really good at using their print ads or their moving image ads to persuade us to buy certain things and they do that through different ways either by evoking certain emotions within us or by suggesting to us the idea that we could be as happy and successful as the people in the adverts if only we just bought whatever it is they are selling to us.Leaving ethics and morals aside for now. But in terms of studying what works in design, adverts are really ehlpful for helping us identify some of those key factors so the next tme you see an ad try to see what techniques they are using or which design principle they are using to either make their design look beautiful or try to see what emotion they are trying to evoke in you.
Red sells to people the idea of intensity, love, and excitement.
2. Yellow
It tends to be used for things that try to convey joy, happiness, intellect. It’s also an incredible attention-grabbing color which is perhaps why. Use of bright shade of yellow is incredibly attention-grabbing, it’ s like taking a huge fluorescent highlighter and highlighting the whole ad.
If you have an app with this sort of bright color, because the color is so intense that people won’t be able to stare at it for a very long time and you will get attention fatigue.
So, this is something better used for attention-grabbing purposes like icon design or screenshot design. In terms of the actual design for the app for the background, this particular shade of yellow is a bit too intense. Take this onboarding screen for an example:
3. Green
Tends to convey ideas of freshness, safety, growth. A lot of food related services uses green in their branding. What else conveys freshness more than this grassy green color palette.
It’s another reason why a lot of food bloggers manages to convince millions of people into green juice craze. The green spreads freshness and emblem of life you can see why this color palette appeal to health conscious people.
Choosing your color palette is not just about advertising or attention grabbing, it’s also about selling your product and appealing to certain desires or instincts that people have.
4. Blue
Tradtionally blue has always been about stability, trust, serenity. Think about anything related to medical, medicine, doctors or health it tends to be using a blue color palette.
Tip: Next time you go for a job interview, if you want to instantly come across as trustworthy, the tip from the designers is to wear a blue shirt without speaking the color already speaks for you and conveys this idea of stability and trust. Equally when you are making a design that needs people to have faith and trust in you then blue might be a good choice.
5. Purple
Meant to evoke ideas of royalty, wealth and feminitiity. Color of choice for a lot of payday loan companies. It’s also heavily used for female fragrances.
Spotify did a mysterious ad putting just purple billboards with a text spotify. As speculated that they were hinting Prince’s jams to be available by the time of his grammys tribute. Notice the relevance though? Prince = Purple?
Next time you are designing an app. The first thing you should consider is what emotions and what ideas are you trying to convey to the user and pick a color palette accordingly.
Next story would be on the topic of how to combine colors and create color palettes.
Thanks for reading!
