Kev Richardson's BizToolz Blog

With the choice of colour being so important in the traditional advertising world, it figures that it's just as important on-line. Colours have so much influence on our emotions that the colour red actually increases the blood pressure and heart rate, while blue decreases them.

Use the right colour and you produce a desired effect on the reader/viewer. The wrong colour defeats the purpose. Like fonts, colours contain meaning and can give impressions that should suit the content. Reds convey warmth, blues and greens are cooler. Pastels can give a light, airy feel to a site. Dark, strong colours can encourage a claustrophobic or powerful impression. As well as these "inherent" meanings, colours and colour schemes can also give certain impressions based on common uses of those colours; for example, pastels might suggest hospital walls, and dull "earth colours" (greens, browns) can hint at a natural setting.

Research has shown that the use of colour backgrounds (in the traditional media) evokes different consumer reactions and emotions. Here are some of the things the research has found:-
· Bright colours - recommended for impulse attraction. Suggests spring, fresh, new.
· Dark colours - little attraction value, suggests heavy, sombre, serious.
· Light colours - good impulse attraction, depending on the colour it can attract attention
outwards.
· Yellow - excellent attention getter, suggests friendly, cheerful, inspiring, vitality.
· Blue/Green - has more impact than pure blue, turquoise has good impulse value.
· Blue provokes cool, fresh, trustworthy emotions (though can be cold/depressing).
· Blue/green is cool, fresh, clean.
· Red - hot, exciting, daring, passionate - but large areas of red are aggressive.
· White - background only.
· Grey - turns off impulse attraction.
· Black - may be useful in special circumstances.

I find colours are a difficult thing to choose and quite a technical area to understand fully. I therefore recommend the use of a graphic artist to assist here if you already have one.

If not, or your budget does not allow you to use one yet, then here are some tips to assist in your selection of colours:-

· Again, one of the best tips I can give about selecting good colours is to have a good look
around at other websites and see what works best.

· Your website should use the same colour scheme consistently throughout the site. All
pages on the site should share a consistent colour scheme. Colour should be used
consistently on all pages, e.g. if on one page, titles are a particular colour, then they should
be that colour on all pages (unless there is a particular reason why not, such as colour-
coding for sections).

· Colour is critical to the appearance of your website and also for your content/copy. For
example while 80% of people usually find blue copy more "attractive" than black, the
comprehension of blue copy is only 15% of black copy (conclusion .. maybe then black copy
is better to use).

· Colours can have a considerable impact on people’s emotional state. When in doubt use good
and soothing colour combination in your website. To much bright colours can often have an
adverse effect on your visitors.

· For the main text/copy in your website:-
. Most Web sites look best with a white background and black text. If choosing different
colours, it's important to be sure that the contrast between colours is sufficient that reading is
easy.
. Be careful of using similar colours (for example, light and dark blue).
. If possible, avoid background graphics since these are often rather "busy" and distract the
eye from text.
. Don't use a black background if possible. If you must use a dark background, choose a fairly
dark colour (or dark grey) instead. Although this has slightly lower contrast than (for
example) white on black, it is easier to read.
. Obviously these rules apply to main text. Headings and other display text can be more varied.
· If you use particularly striking colours or colours that often indicate warning (for example,
yellow on black), even for small areas of text, these may distract attention from the main
text. Be careful not to create too many strong, distinctive colour effects that draw the eye in
this way.

Here are my recommendations for colour resources:-

· This site (http://www.colorsontheweb.com/). This site is dedicated to the use of colours in
design and especially in web design and is a good resource (especially if you want to find
colours to blend in with a certain colour that you have selected – To do this click on ‘Color
Tools’ on the top banner of the site, then click on ‘Color Wizard’. Here you can then submit
your own base colour and it automatically returns matching colours for the one you selected).
The whole site is well worth a look and I know that many graphic artists also use this site as a
great place to start for selecting colours).

· Click here for a good research paper on colours – i.e.
(http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/AHNCUR.html).

In the next post I will provide more tips important for your website presentation.

As always, wishing you every success for your business.

Kev Richardson
http://www.biztoolz.com.au/

Labels: marketing on internet