Red = Happy? Orange = Creative? Blue = Fun? ...Color Associations Revisited | Hacker News Reader

Red = Happy? Orange = Creative? Blue = Fun? ...Color Associations Revisited

colourlovers.com

30 pointsdariusmonsef8 comments

While interesting, these conclusions require much more in-depth analysis over multiple years to be of much real value.

Colourlovers.com is pushing this as a way of finding out what color clothes people are going to buy, but do the results of this survey correspond with the colors people choose in their clothing? Do these colors vary significantly from year to year? What are the mean values and standard deviations for various popular hues across international borders? Sure, the US is red, Canada is yellow, and Australia is orange, but by how much?

You could do a lot of interesting things with this data...does anyone know if they've released it?

We are open to sharing the data.

I wasn't saying that the data directly is useful for people looking to plan fashion lines a year from now... I was simply saying that the old model of forecasting far off becomes harder to do when mass customization allows for people to have more options.

Cool! That's very generous of you.

I didn't mean to say that that's exactly what you implied, I simply meant to suggest that the postulation might have a flaw, even if it is an interesting one. Either way, I'm glad to have found your site! As someone who has difficulty with color, I'll be checking it out for sure.

In terms of color, I would say myspace created the association blue == social (eg. http://web.archive.org/web/20050104004746/http://myspace.com... ). Thus I would even argue that facebook wouldnt have become the stellar success it is today, if its main theme was, for example, green.

From a programmers perspective choosing the right colors for your product might seem like a mundane task. but I think it is a key factor when it comes to popularity - just because the human perception relies so much on colors. Just ask yourself; would you buy a red car? What would happen if facebook changed the “facebook blue” from #3B5998 to #3B59CC?

Facebook is blue not so much because of emulating Myspace... but because Zuckerberg is Red/Green colorblind... so that was the obvious choice for him.

And Blue has been a strong color online and in the business world for a long time... Think IMB "Big Blue." Again, there are social reasons that could affect this... but there is also the fact that tech has mostly been a male dominated space and a large number of males are red/green colorblind.

And the best example of how funny the social connections are with color. Can you imagine driving a pink car? Wearing a pink suit? Sounds girly right? You'd never do that.

But it wasn't that long ago that the gender association of those colors switched. It was an old advertisement for from the 30s or so, that showed that pink was the great new color for little girls. To that point pink was for boys and blue for girls. (Because Red is a strong aggressive color and blue is a soft mellow one... and pink is just a lighter version of red.)

Where are the negative color associations? What color was used for fear in 2010 etc.

We didn't specifically exclude negative words... But I'm sure we could dig in and look for specific negative words like Anger, Fear, Hate, etc. and see what colors are associated with those words...

Good idea for a larger color association specific post.

I'm curious about this too - my rough-cut understanding of the evolution of color response is that it lives mostly in the basic risk / reward division (eg, what is good to eat, what is poisonous, etc). So there's bound to be a set that you can use to antagonize people =)

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