Psychology color marketing

Color is a powerful means of setting emotion, which is the real driving force behind decision making. It is hard to define an exact science for color psychology because there are subjective meanings involved, both at a personal and cultural level.

I spent many years as a decorative artist, creating rooms with paint effects, before finally settling on a design career on the Internet. This experience gives me some qualification, padded out by media specific research.

Light versus dark
In general, light backgrounds create tidier, uncluttered interfaces. On screen, they can be tiring due to the glare emitted by monitors. You can see on this page that I "mixed" a light greyish blue to sit behind the text. This reduces the glare by a few degrees.

For shopping or reading information, I would favour clean light backgrounds, but avoid dull greys, they strike the utilitarian feel of software and Windows applications.

There are times when dark backgrounds will strike a cosy, nocturnal feel, perhaps with an element of rebelliousness inherent. Younger audiences will be more tolerant of "twilight" seductiveness than older surfers.

Saturated colors
Saturated colors are pure and strong. They have the feel of coming straight out of the tube and consequently lack sophistication. Avoid them at all costs, they will speak of cheap, uncreative amateur attempts to "bludgeon" visual relief into pages. They are very tiring to the eye and look dreadful when combined or used on large areas (heaven forbid). Huge bevelled buttons are a favourite area of travesty for online saturated crime.

The psychology of the color blue
Deep blues create a feeling of the ether, a mysterious and enchanting space that rolls out to the very edges of the imperceptible. I have used it to border the central area of my page (most effective at 1024x768 screen resolution) in order to really clean the white up (making an expensive feel) and to create a sense of expansiveness. This in turn gets the effect of suggesting there is a wider space out there that goes on possibly forever (the wonderful mystery of cyberspace).

Hot color psychology
Tread with caution when using red or orange on your screen. Deeper reds look classy and need a touch of black within them to temper the cheap glare of saturated varieties. Using the border effect could work, or as a sparky relief to clean whites. I have used red for detail, balancing the blue and white to prevent blandness.

Orange must be controlled carefully, but might work en masse if tempered with some thick black detail. It is a good food color, promoting a feeling of hunger.

Green is serene
Use green to create serenity, but never use yellowish greens (lime) for large areas. Blue greens will always speak class and restraint (think silk and classical elegance). Actually, used carefully, lime green could create kitsch 60's atmospherics (be afraid).

Mixing screen colors
In the world of paint, mixing black or umber (earth color) always tones down a set of colors and can strike harmony between the most unlikely combinations. Adding a touch of white can get a chalky feel not unlike the greyish blue beneath the text. This is difficult to achieve on screen, especially if you are starting with the web safe palette.

I use a graphics programme (Fireworks, but anything similar will do) to stretch out sheets of black and white over my basic colors, and then make them transparent by degrees. This gets a better effect than trying to mix them. This will temper computer colors down beautifully if that is what you want to achieve.

Blue is the color, links are the game...
There are some screen conventions that I find myself increasingly conforming to. Using blue as a link color can get you better navigation results, because there is a custom of familiarity to its use in this way. People like to feel at home, and color conventions such as these only help.

Texture and color
Please don't use marble tiles or crude watermarks! This stinks of early Frontpage syndrome