Devious Design

It’s time for some color analysis. I’m not going to chat about color theory (you can learn that here) or different palettes or patterns (if you’d like some of those, check out this spiffy blog) — I’d just like to offer another perspective on how color plays a part in perception and how that’s always applicable to design.

We all know that people infer different meanings and emotions from different colors. Red = angry/stop/love, blue = calm/sad/water, green = money/go/natural, yellow = happy/caution/cowardice, black = evil/death/classic, and so forth. Because of this, it becomes very important how you use colors in your artistic or professional creations.

For example, you may notice that places like Panera and Starbucks color their walls and promotional materials in warm shades of yellow and orange, often accompanied by a muted shade of green. They make customers feel cozy and comfortable and hungry. Places like schools and hospitals are often white or a light tan to look clean and to keep people focused. Other places like artsy bars or music venues can paint their walls black to appear upscale or sophisticated.

On the contrary, improper use of color can give people the wrong message. You wouldn’t want to paint your hospital blood red or black, which would imply sickness and death. You probably wouldn’t want to paint your law office lime green and pink because no one would take you seriously as a lawyer since your office would wind up looking like a day care.

The same concepts apply to your Web site. Bright colors improperly used will look childish, and on a light-colored background they will be hard to read. Very dark colors are hard to use on Web sites because cheap monitors have a hard time displaying them, so any different values will look much darker than you, as designer, initially envisioned. Take this very blog, for example — it looks lovely on my Mac, but when I look at it on other computers, I sometimes have a really hard time reading the text. Be expecting a new theme sometime soon. Part of the reason Facebook outlived MySpace is because it looks cleaner and more professional. MySpace signed its own death certificate by allowing users to redesign their own pages, bringing in all sorts of misused colors and images and flaming logos and animated gifs. Ew. For Web sites, it’s probably best just to stick with a white background, dark text (shades of grey are great), and an accent color or two that fit your image — your site will be clean easy to read. Dark backgrounds are a good way to go for things like galleries or portfolios so your work is what stands out as the most striking thing on the page.

One group that has really mastered their use of color is the movie industry. Movie producers know what they’re doing when it comes to color. Directors like Guierrmo Del Toro sketch out full books of how they want to use colors in their films – different shades for different scenes, bright, over-saturated colors to show good memories, dark to show fear and suspense. Some shoot entire films with different filters to make their movies look moodier. For example, the “Underworld” films have a blue filter applied to almost every scene, which makes the film seem darker and more dramatic. Some may think this is cheesy, but it works. Other movies like “Man on Fire” is very yellow. All of Baz Lurhman’s big films like “Romeo and Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge” are overly bright, giving the whole picture a very whimsical feel.

So please, think about colors before you use them, and make sure your product is readable. Thanks!