Great information! I've gotta bookmark so I can re-read and assimilate it all. Thanks a million!

Color theory and the psychology of color has always been a passion of mine. Thanks for posting!

people love this kind of article, it's hilarious.

There is no scientific evidence that certain color choices create more website conversions.

This article is misleading and 100% bogus.

great article!

This is so interesting!

Poor Manekineko. Every time an article like this appears, cannot resist railing against it. But I must agree.



The word "science" in this sentence "There is the science behind how the products are organized, labels are written.." is misleading. Science is the practice of creating theories that are proved or disproved systematically through empirical evidence. The "science" being referred to here is... ta ta ta da.... (creepy music)... graphic design.



You know - balance, symmetry, repetition, negative vs positive space, the "golden mean" and yes, warm and cool colours etc etc. Its a system, a visual language that we have developed, an attempt to create the most pleasing appearance. And sometimes that pleasing appearance is meant to make you buy something.



The article attempts to gloss over the fact that colour association is unpredictable by saying "Color associates can vary from country to country but in Western culture they are basically the same." Actually, colour associations vary from moment to moment, even in "western culture".



For example - green. In the table given, its supposed to be associated with growth as well as wealth. Just off the top of my head, green is also associated with envy, with nausea, with health, with the sea, with the flavour mint, with "go", with inexperience...



Colours cannot insinuate hidden messages into your conciousness. I mean, have an actual look at the examples given above. Even compare them to the supposed "meaning" of the colours given in that colour table. So according to this, Amazon is appealing to kiddies with their orange buttons, as well as evoking bridal purity and at the same time, the sterility of hospitals with their white background? The top title bar evokes secure and trustworthy response. And that little green "in stock" message is meant to calm you down. Or wait no, green = wealth. Or is it growth?



It just does not work like that. People certainly do respond to colour. But not in a predictable enough way to make it possible to manipulate them in the way that this article suggests.

le sigh. we can go on for hours about the fact that this article is misleading - but being synesthetic, i must agree partly with everyone.

in any case, the company i work for uses black and white for their backgrounds and their shoes have colour...we now have BRIGHT RED jackets and shoes which are kind of cool. >D

I totally agree with Klip
The article is Very general...most of the color associations in these types of articles are general, without depth or explanation. Mainly becasue the writers are either ignorant or they focus on one aspect of color: consumer products and personal color prefereces. And trends...but that's another rant. (I'm a former member of the Color Marketing Group...the trend forecasting folks).

As an example: "Green" is associated with money only in the USA....because we have green money. There are many levels of color associations, some are on a psychological level such as orange meaning 'heat' or 'fire'. That is a universal association. However, there are associations based on societal norms: in most westernized countries, yellow and orange are 'happy' and 'optimistic', but in Japan, 'pink' is the color of happiness.
And beyond all of these simple color explanations, context is everything....obviously a white bridal gown has a different connotation from a white bandage used in a hospital. A certain shade of yellowish green paired with burnt orange becomes dreaded avocado from the 1970's to designers, but paired with a new shade of hot pink, it looks trendy again.

So, the article an is interesting look at scratching the surface of color meanings and some trends, but if you want some depth of color knowledge, I recommend reading anything by Faber Birren or Frank. H. Mahnke.
~C

As a seller this can be a huge help.

Baker's boxes are: pink = "sweet" > sweet treats always read pink.
Fast food restaurants are: red = "hungry" + yellow = "anxious" > yellow & red reads "rush to eat".

Though there is so much more science behind this topic of color theory that has not been mentioned or referenced. > Rooms that are painted "Pepto-Bismal" pink are only the "time-out" cells in Prisons, where inmates stay for a limited time of 15 minutes max. After that the calming effect starts to shift drastically in reverse!...
Note to parents of little princess pink followers: do not do 'dat.

nah there's no science behind that pink sweet baker business or anything like it

I guess fire hydrants are supposed to make you hungry huh

sorry but in other parts of the world green is not necessarily associated with money. Here, green is associated with (also and especially environment-)friendliness. Along with everything else (here, yellow stands for envy, but we began becoming americanised)

Yellow+red are a combination that which is associated to "cheap" here, also thanks to McD....unless it is a reference to for instance Spanish products, where the yellow and red shades are a little different..

We do not have electric blue for pornography, we use the red/pink or whatever, usually a fuchsia/neon pink.

What about purple and turquoise? Turquoise is a colour that is often in use by travel agencies.

Grey, anyone?

The article forgot gold and silver, 2 very important colours in the businesses.

This article makes my blood boil. What a pile of facile piffle and balderdash it represents.

An excellent example of loose thinking, idiotic generalisations and the lack of hard evidence that a 1st year student would get laughed at for.

Seriously - can this site not get better articles than this?

I'd feel safer with using multi-variate testing to find the best colour design for converting sellers than working off specious generalisations like this.

C.

I think that was the fanciest insult I've received. Nice work.

We like knowing that our members are smart and creative people, so we can present ideas that they can use as inspiration or confirm why they do something in another way... We're not about trying to force enlightenment on people, the big color forecasters have that pretty well covered. We want to provide you with the tools, ideas, inspiration and the platform to find enlightenment on your own with the support of each other.

Thanks to all for creating an interesting conversation around this topic. We'll try and find more piffles to balderdash around in the blog for future conversations :)

Really great post. The call to action colours are important for us so that clicks turn into sales. Interesting that lots of people are now using orange.

Great post, very informative and handy to have at hand

Every consumer group and market has different knowledge of colour and its meaning, therefore each company would need to research its market fully to decide on the knowledge that consumer group had. During a basic experiment undertaken for my University course I spoke to different age groups about their perceptions regarding the connotations of colour. The answers did vary according to age and background such as ‘What colour represents danger?’ obvious to most people red- traffic lights etc but one candidate answered yellow- referring to the colour on the packaging of dangerous chemicals. Generalisations are ok if the consumer group is broad such as Amazon, but further research is necessary if targeting a specific range of people.

When I shop, colour makes a vital important link making a impulsive purchase.