Color is a very important tool for conveying tone, encouraging emotions, and connecting with your viewers on a subconscious level. Used correctly, the color tones you use can be harmonious with each other and your textual message. Incorrectly used, colors can repel viewers, clash, and appear in disagreement with your website or blog’s message.
While colors initially may seem self-explanatory due to our societal and cultural cues (blue = sad, yellow = happy, etc), the hues can have deeper contextual messages for your readers. Here are some important color connotations:
Red: enthusiastic, powerful, confident, energetic, protective, exciting, prosperous. Most exercise products and companies use this color to encourage energy and assurance.
Orange: active, healthy, social, friendly, warm, fun. This can be a risky color to choose as a central piece of a logo or background, as people usually have a strong innate negative or positive response to it.
Yellow: communication, mental stimulation, optimism, enlightenment, happiness, creativity. Even though yellow is typically representative of happiness in American culture, in Greece it signifies sadness and in French culture yellow represents jealousy.
Green: soothing, mentally and physically relaxing, harmonious. As a naturally pervasive color, green makes an excellent dominant color in backgrounds etc as we are so accustomed to seeing it around us.
Blue: calming, trustworthy, cooling, intuitive, commitment, stimulates productivity. Like green, blue is common in nature in the sky, oceans, and lakes and provides a connection to the natural world.
Purple: uplifting, creative, calming, royal, mystic, balanced. The color has the connotation of peaceful compromise as it is a perfect equilibrium of two primary colors.
Pink: energetic, youthful, fun, active, confident, passionate. This color encourages friendliness. It appears open-minded, eager, and flexible.
White: purity, clarity, cleanliness, new beginnings, peace, safety, happiness. Used effectively, white can be more than simply a default background. It can emphasize without being obnoxious.
Gray: intelligence, sobriety, calming, efficiency, authoritative, elegant. As a perfect neutral, gray is the ideal background color.
Black: sophistication, confidence, potential, authoritative, weighty, important. While too much can be oppressive and overwhelming, the dark color provides an idea of restful emptiness and the urge to fill it.
Brown: security, responsibility, comfort, warmth. It can be a difficult color to pair successfully, but when used correctly can provide a homey, earth tone.
The next step is knowing how to pair and identify the colors you wish to incorporate in your website, logo, or blog design. Check in soon for a follow-up piece continuing on color selection, influence, and pairing!
