Welcome to our series on building a business website. Your designer will talk about ‘branding’ your site and ‘choosing your house colors’. To be able to understand the psychology behind colors, we created this quick tutorial.

Colors influence your visitors

When deciding on a design for your website, two challenges arise:

1. choosing a layout
2. and choosing a color scheme for your website.

When you start thinking about how you want your website to look and how you want it to behave, it is best to do a search online and find other websites that you like. Bookmark these sites and make notes of the specific elements that attracted you to the site. Don’t worry too much about looking too similar, during the design process, yourweb site will start looking distinctively different from all the other sites out there.

Layout often seems a daunting decision to make, but you will soon notice that the best sites have similar layouts. Reinventing the wheel makes no sense, as it would only serve to confuse the user. E.g. you could put you logo at the bottom right hand side of the page, but users would not notice it. We expect logos to be at the top left. This is true for most elements on your page. Just look around on the web, and you’ll quickly notice what I mean.

Colors are more challenging and matching colors is as much an art as it is based on making educated decisions.

Nevertheless, there are some simple guidelines that will greatly simplify your decision process.

Step 1: Choosing Your Primary Website Color

Your primary color will set the mood for your website. It will instantly communicate the emotional tone of your company and is therefore one of the most important decisions you will make. In order to understand the feelings your primary color will generate it is time to go to the shrink.

The Psychology of Colors

Blue: coolness, spirituality, freedom, patience, loyalty, peace, trustworthiness; can also imply sadness, depression.

Blue has a calming effect on our brains. Just look at the sky or the sea, and you’ll feel its calming effect.

We tend to associate it with safety and stability and it has become to signify intelligence, reassurance and trust. It calms our energy and enables us to focus better, think more rationally.

It is for this reason that blue is the color of business. Business offers pragmatic solutions to our needs and problems, and strives to create stability and progress in our lives.

Blue is a great color for sites that deal with practical problems, intellectually challenging solutions and brands that aim to give you more control over your daily activities.

The U.S. Air Force chose blue as their primary color to emphasize that they are not focused on war, but on creating stability in the world.

Red: energy, passion, excitement, power; also implies aggression, danger.

Red is a powerful color, a real attention grabber. Our instincts register it as passion, fire, love and lust, or on the dark side with war, violence, blood and aggression. Psychological tests have shown that red raises blood pressure and can cause perspiration.

Red is associated with blood: the flushing of cheeks, the redness of a woman’s lips.

There is a reason why stop signs are red: your eye is drawn to them, we are hard-wired to notice red.

Sites that deal with romance will also benefit from using red as a primary color.

Youthful brands that aim to tap into the passionate nature of their audience tend to use red in their branding, example in case: Coca Cola.

Note: Pink is the softer side of red. Pink is romantic, calming and feminine.

Yellow: light, optimism, happiness, brightness, joy.

Yellow, the color of the rising sun, has come to signify hope, light and energy and simply looking at the color increases your metabolism.

Brands like Fair Trade choose this logo to symbolize the benefits they bring to the world, particulary producers in the third world.

Yellow is an attention grabbing color, but use it sparingly, as it is the most fatiguing color to the eye due to the high amount of light it reflects.

Green: life, naturalness, restfulness, health, wealth, prosperity

Green is the color of spring, of fresh grass, of the Earth renewing itself. As a result, it has come to signify health, growth and wealth. Green symbolizes renewal, and fertility.

Green is shown to be a color that relieves stress and improves healing.

That is why many healthy choice brands embrace green in their branding as the example below illustrates:

Orange: friendliness, warmth, approachability, energy, playfulness, courage.

Orange is very blatant and vulgar. It makes you immediately start having feelings.–Wolf Kahn

Orange is the color we find most in autumn, or towards the end of a day. It is vibrant and warm, a bit removed from the passionate and sometimes dangerous nature of red.

Orange has been known to stimulate the appetite.

The telecommunications company of the same name choose orange as its primary color to reflect its youthfulness and zest for life and to illustrate a more carefree attitude.

Black: power, elegance, secrecy, mystery.

Since the dawn of time we’ve known black as the color of night, a time when darkness shrouds the world in mystery. It is often associated with evil and menace or mourning and death. This is however a purely cultural preference, as the ancient Egyptians used to associate black with life and rebirth, seeing the night more as a gestation period (the sun was reborn every morning).

Black has also come to symbolize power and elegance, popularized in fashion because of its slimming nature.

The colors in Batman’s logo did not come about by accident. It tries to express the menace, the power and the mystery of the dark crusador, while the yellow tries to show the mission of the Batman: one of hope and renewal of the world. In the last 20 years Batman has been portrayed as a more tortured character, and the yellow was often removed from his logo in order to better reflect his menace and moral ambiguity.

White: purity, cleanliness, youth, freshness, peace.

White…is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black…God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. – G. K. Chesterton

White represents cleanliness, purity, and spirituality. It represents life and marriage in Western cultures, but it represents death in Eastern cultures.

Dove’s branding focuses on using white to appeal to women and promote its main message of cleanliness.

Color tells people who you are

As a brand, one should not underestimate the power of color. Color tells your audience how you perceive yourself. It plays an essential part in your communication strategy and should be chosen with care.

Overview of brands and their color schemes

Share your ideas about branding and color

Use the comments to share some of your thoughts on color and branding, and upload your logos to illustrate how brands make use of colors to communicate their messages.