09.29.03
 By
W. L. Wilder
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.
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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. The number
one attention getter, yellow is a very spiritual, eye-catching color,
and when used in small amounts it is very inviting and cheerful. 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, as 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.
Scheming to Color A World Wide Website
Okay. Sometimes it's hard to come up with a good color scheme. Or maybe it's just rough trying to get a set of colors that go well together.
Thought it'd be nice to share a few sites I've found that have some really good online tools and charts for help selecting colors for your websites. ...
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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 the owner and founder of Critical Thinking (http://www.thinkingcritically.net),
a website analyst company that researches user habits to make website
marketing more profitable.
Read this Newsletter at: http://www.websitenotes.com/2003/0929.html |
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