Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir is green. She is green and dresses green. Do you like the association or is it too obvious?
The design itself is quite a broad term, right? Design of what? A website? A house? Or just a picture for promoting a specific product?
In order to truly determine the power of color, we need to determine what we will be applying this color to in the first place. Let’s go with websites in this case as they’re some of the most commonly designed “products” these days and can be done by pretty much everybody.
It’s much easier to implement design patterns on a website than on a home, right?
Let’s choose only three colors in this case, as mentioned every one of them would be a bit too long for a small educational article.
Blue
Blue has always been perceived as a very calming color no matter where it’s used. In most cases, it’s associated with something such as the sky or the ocean, which tends to bring this better connection to nature than anything else can.
This is one of the reasons that people started calling Blue as the warmest color there is, as it leaves a very neutral emotion among those that interact with it.
It’s most definitely not the most “action-heavy” color to use for a business that’s dependant on customer action too much, but it could be a great color choice for a product that hasn’t been seen in the past.
Why? Because it helps the visitor calm down by the sight of the color and perceive the new product as something less threatening.
For example, whenever the product is based on subjective belief such as claiming your free psychic reading online, some kind of additional comforting content needs to be provided.
Why would subjective belief cause such issues? Well, let’s take a look at the words used. Free and psychic. For most people, the first word triggers a sense of alert as they believe they’re walking into a scam, while the second word triggers a sense of disbelief as not everybody is into psychic stuff.
There’s very little that the service provider can add to their content to ensure its trustworthiness besides lowering the reader’s anxiety as much as possible, and the color blue, or any variations of it is enough to do so.
Red
The color red is very seldom used on websites that have nothing to do with food. To be honest, red is quite an aggressive color and manages to distract the user from the product itself as the human consciousness is more drawn towards bright colors rather than the more dim colors that could be present in the product that the website is trying to sell.
Furthermore, it has been confirmed that the color red alongside a hint of yellow triggers a sense of hunger or a desire to eat something in people. It’s quite a bizarre phenomenon, but we’ve all experienced it while passing a McDonald’s or a food place that uses similar colors.
However, let’s focus on the website more than the product. The use of red is generally accepted in most design patterns, but only if it is paired up with other colors and is not the dominant one.
Should red be dominant on all of the pages, it’s very likely to instigate an aggressive or inhospitable vibe to your visitors, thus increasing the bounce rate (the rate at which people leave the website).
Black is usually the perfect contrast to the color red, as it dims the brightness and makes it a bit easier for the eyes to adjust.
Green
And finally, we’ve arrived at the color green which is a direct representation of peace of mind. However, this color is mostly present on online stores and simple blogs which have something to do with plants, but that’s too obvious, right?
Why would you want to use the color green on your website then? Well, we need to choose different shades of green.
Brighter green colors are often used in therapy websites. Yes, that’s right, some psychiatrists and therapists even go to lengths for designing their offices with as many things colored green as possible.
It helps relax their clients and feel a peace of mind, which then allows the therapists to get as much information from them as possible.
Slightly darker shades of green are often ignored completely. Even if the color manages to stand out on the website, any other element that is colored black will overpower the pallet. Therefore, it’s highly recommended that if you are choosing green, then go for a brighter version as darker green such as “swamp green” tends to get lost and not leave any impact at all.
That’s about it
Although there are more than enough colors to talk about for website design, these three are some of the most dominant colors you will find across the internet.
The only other color that can be brought to mind is orange, which is slowly but surely starting to represent creativity and fun, but that’s a rising trend at this point and still needs to garner some support as a trend.
