Our relationship with color goes way back, and it changes over time. Did you know blue was for girls and pink was for boys until about 100 years ago? Pink was considered a stronger colour whilst blue was considered daintier, and was associated with the Virgin Mary, and therefore perceived as more appropriate for girls.

Color is so important in communicating your brand that companies have even trade marked their signature colours. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with it’s famous purple, Heinz’s baked bean turquoise. Apple demonstrated how important colour can be in changing a brand’s perception, first by bringing our their iMacs in delicious colours, now seen on the multitude of iPods now glowing in the temples that are the apple stores. Research by the Institute for Colour Research revealed that people make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or product within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone. 

So, color is important, but why is this? Color enables recognition and memory, attracts attention and acts as a visual aid to guide the eye around a page. One of the biggest and the most fundamental reason though is that it evokes emotion, and weather you like it or not, our decisions are made based mainly as a result of our emotional reactions, not logic. After carrying out a study proving this at University College London, Bernedetto De Martino commented “the brain stores emotional memories of past decisions, and those are what drive people’s choices in life.”

Our emotional reactions are closely connected to our experiences – our childhood memories of candyfloss, the seaside, the yellow-tinted hues of old photographs, these color palettes transport us to a different place. Some of these associations we share collectively, and some are individual to our own experience. Therefore associations change depending on where you had those experience and any color languages you have been taught through your culture. For example red can mean danger, passion, purity, death, mourning, vitality, and marriage, depending on where you’re from. This is a great summary of color and meanings across continents that provides a really useful guide.

Age and gender make a difference too, according to a report by Leslie Harrington PhD and Anat Lechner PhD, younger people see orange as more peaceful, and older people associate more positive emotions with red and purple. Red, yellow and orange were seen more negatively by men, whilst black was viewed more positively. The report doesn’t speculate as to why this might be, and it seems like no one really knows, but in my view the most likely reason is that it’s a mixture of context and experience.

As no one really knows why we feel why we do about color, my advice would be to focus on context. What do you want your audience to feel? This should be heavily linked to your brand strategy. When I’m developing a brand story for a new company, we pick 3 emotions we want to evoke in our audience; this should drive the color choice. When we’re talking about color, I try to make connections with things in the real world that make me feel how I want the audience to feel, and let this lead the palette. For example, we all know natural colors are calming, and this is because they bring our minds back to simple things that have been around for eternity and will still be here, relatively unchanged after we’ve gone. They bring back the perspective to our lives, which is very therapeutic. So if I want to evoke these emotions in my audience, this is where I’ll look. I love design-seeds.com for this because it takes reference from nature and man-made found objects, and pulls beautiful harmonious colour palettes out of them.

Altering reality

Color can be used to completely distort perspective, as is fantastically demonstrated in the work of Felice Varini, who paints geometric shapes onto spaces that change your perception of the space and the object painted within it, depending on where you view it from.

By manipulating the rods and cones in your eyes, you can use the after image effect, (the visual distortion you get when you stare at one solid colou=r then look at a white wall and you see the opposite color on the colour wheel). The Lilac Chaser demonstrates this very well whilst also adding motion into the equation, making colors completely disappear. This video on New Scientist shows another way you can trick the brain using colour and motion, this won the best illusion of the year contest .

So as designers, there’s obviously a lot to think about when picking your colours for your next project, and a huge amount of opportunity to manipulate reality! There are some excellent places now online that can help you with this process, for example, the aforementioned design-seeds.com, colourscheme.com, colourlovers.com has loads of tools, you can even upload a photo and their photocopa software will pull out a colour palette from it. Pinterest.com lets you create visual mood-boards in a really intuitive way, providing an easy way to build a color board online that’s shareable. There are thousands of places and people predicting the colour trends based on all sorts of factors, from the economy, human behavior and crowd-sourced trend-spotting, but one place to have a look at some free color trend info is here: and if you want to try your hand at injecting some illusion into your work, colourlovers has some good inspiration.

If you want to read more about color there’s a great reading list on the colour association website. And if you want to ensure your next design project is color-perfect then brief now!

Hope you have a colourful and inspiring day!

Ruth