The Psychology of Colour
themarketingindex.com
themarketingindex.com
i've had to sit through enough corporate branding meetings with agencies to select adjectives that describe companies and mission statements. the aura of importance is palpable. invariably, every company ends up with some form of "trustworthy reliable innovative and customer-focused.", but it takes 5 meetings and 4 c-levels to arrive at the exact ordering. i just bring the popcorn now.
> (round shapes are more trustworthy & straight sharp edges are more striking)
so they have proven that round shaped designs result in what? better lifetime value? higher customer retention or aquisition?
the adjectives assigned to colors are hilarious
> Yellow – Happy, Friendly, Warning
so, both friendly and warning. or is that a typo and they meant Warming? and the CAT logo is there - a heavy industrial equipment mfg? yes, the CAT color is appropriate because it matches a yellow construction sign. and most of the crap that mcdonalds produces is some shade of deep fried yellow-orange. they're appropriate colors but imo have questionable connections with warmth/friendliness.
most of this advice is dubious at best. it's like the apt statement about advertising spend, "half of it is wasted, i just don't know which half"
/rant
What's true is that that certain colors "harmonize" better with others, but little of value can be said about any one color in isolation.
I have this unpopular opinion that a lot of color theory in terms of visual harmony - like much of psychology - is a bunch of p-hacked pseudo-science;-)
The most telling sign for me is that the relationship between harmonic colors most often are (and have been for a very long time) defined by certain simple angles in a color wheel. While the specific angles have always been the same (like 180 degrees for contrasting colors) the underlying color wheels have changed drastically[1]. Even today the angles are most often interpreted in relation to the hue circle of the HSV (or HSL) model which takes a very simplistic approach to hue angles compared to perceptual models like CIECAM.
Fortunately not all designers fall for this quackery. I especially like the summary of the chapter about color harmony from Linda Holtzschue's book "Understanding Color: An Introduction for Designers":
> * No single factor determines color harmony. All elements of a color composition contribute to the overall effect.
> * The complementary relationship between hues is a strong basis for harmony, but it is not the only basis. Any hues used together can be made to be harmonious.
> * Even intervals between colors contribute to harmony. Even intervals are pleasing whether between colors of different hue, different value, different saturation, or any combination of these qualities.
But I will say that color is hugely important to branding. If I see an ad I can instantly tell who it's from if the company uses consistent color choices.
again, it's all highly dependent on 1M factors.
are we to conclude that rounded designs will be preferred by people? should everyone use rounded deigns? if not, who should?
Yellow=warning. Many poisonous critters use this color as a warning (snakes, salamanders, etc)
Blue=calming. Maybe triggers feeling of being near water which I’m sure long ago was quite reassuring when access wasn’t guaranteed.
Violet – Luxurious
Historically, most clothes for most commoners were pretty bland. Dying something purple was very, very hard and expensive. Thus, it became associated with royalty because no one else could afford it.
The association still persists, though now any schmuck in most developed countries can wear something purple.
It depends on how it is used and the exact shade of yellow.
Bright yellow is a really strong color. If you use it in large swaths, yes, it is alarming.
It is why we use it on buses: So you can't miss them. They have researched this. Yellow is the easiest shade to see without trying. It's the hardest shade to overlook.
But touches of a less-strong shade of yellow as an accent color do help warm things up and signal "friendly" and "happy." So a trustworthy shade of dark blue with small touches of yellow can be a good color combo.
I have read research-based books about color and had a class in Cartography for GIS. There is research on various aspects of color -- it's literal perception (like yellow being hard to overlook) and it's subjective perception, which can be influenced by culture. For example, some cultures wear black to funerals and others wear white to funerals.
So you do have to be aware of cultural context when trying to brand something. If you only ever try to brand stuff for Middle Class American Consumers, you may not realize that. But if you ever try to branch out to Asia or whatever, stuff that works here may not work there.
The core problem is that from the very birth of colour science, the subject has attracted floppy thinking. Newton himself added an accurate colour to his colour wheel for no other reason than he thought it should correspond with the classical musical scale.
* Color: From Hexcodes to Eyeballs - http://jamie-wong.com/post/color/
* Practical Color Theory for People Who Code - https://tallys.github.io/color-theory/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4383146/
Color and psychological functioning: a review of theoretical and empirical work
Light by definition is the "radiation that is considered from the point of view of its ability to excite the human visual system" thus there is not such a thing as invisible light.
> The primary colours(yellow, red & blue) we were taught to paint with in school are wrong. The actual correct primary colours are yellow, magenta & cyan. The proof is in your printer cartridges.
...but two paragraphs later:
> Primary: red, yellow and blue, these colours can not be made from any other colours and are the building blocks of the other categories.
(My vague and possibly-incorrect understanding is that any three hues can be used as "primary hues", but different choices will result in different hue spaces, and it's just that CMY and RBY produce spaces that are useful in printing and painting, respectively.)
RGB if a thing is emitting light.
CMYK if a thing is reflecting light.
So it is true to say "Red, green, and blue are the basic building blocks of other colours"
It is also true to say "When you were told in primary school that the primary colours for your paints were red, green, and blue, this was untrue"
I do actually think that this is an example of a somewhat muddled thought process that is jumping from one thing to a other pretty eratically, or perhaps of something being edited such that it is now confusing to a reader going over it for the first time, honestly the whole thing reads a little like it was written by someone who really enjoys stimulants and can't keep their focus on one thing. But _technically_ I don't think any of the content is _wrong_ (obviously this means excluding ~70% of the content because it's largely about how people feel, and this is probably never _wrong_ but it's also not a matter of fact...)
You were correct and I jusy managed to misread the article twice....
The reason that red, green and blue are sometimes stated as primary colors in the context of mixing ink layers is that red and green and blue are rather vague terms. What is meant by red in this context would more exactly be called magenta and green is used to designate cyan. Wikipedia puts it this way[1]:
> Before the color names cyan and magenta were in common use, these primaries were often known as blue and red, respectively, and their exact color has changed over time with access to new pigments and technologies.
Also I think education about primary colors is just a mess and the same Wikipedia article[1] talks about this too:
> Elementary art education materials, dictionaries, and electronic search engines often define primary colors effectively as conceptual colors (generally magenta, yellow, and cyan; or red, green, and blue) that can be used to mix "all" other colors and often go further and suggest that these conceptual colors correspond to specific hues and precise wavelengths. Such sources do not present a coherent, consistent definition of primary colors since real primaries cannot be complete.
1. a set of real colorants or colored lights that can be combined to produce a gamut of colors -> "real" primaries like RGB or CMYK
2. a set of imaginary colors that can be combined to produce the whole gamut of colors a human with normal vision can see -> color space primaries like XYZ or LMS
3. a set of colors that an observer perceives as pure -> psychological primaries or more precisely unique hues like those used in NCS or CIECAM02
4. the colors that are best examples of the (considered to be universal) basic color terms -> psychological primaries or more precisely focal colors (focal colors are a different concept than unique hues but empirically they seem to coincide with the unique hues, so the primaries from NCS or CIECAM02 are good examples here too.)
> (My vague and possibly-incorrect understanding is that any three hues can be used as "primary hues", but different choices will result in different hue spaces, and it's just that CMY and RBY produce spaces that are useful in printing and painting, respectively.)
If you are happy spanning any arbitrary gamut than any three hues will do. If your ambition is to cover the whole gamut of normal human vision no three real colors will do. You will either have to use more than three or allow imaginary colors. On the other hand there are infinitely many sets of primaries to span a certain gamut. Wikipedia expresses this probably much better than I can[2]:
> All sets of real and color-space primaries are arbitrary, in the sense that there is no one set of primaries that can be considered the canonical set. Primary pigments or light sources selected for a given application on the basis of subjective preferences as well as practical factors such as cost, stability, availability etc. Color-space primaries can be subjected to meaningful one-to-one transformations so that the transformed space is still complete and each color is specified with a unique sum.
“One reason the artist's primary colors work at all is due to the imperfect pigments being used have sloped absorption curves, and change color with concentration. A pigment which is pure red at high concentrations can behave more like magenta at low concentrations. This allows it to make purples that would otherwise be impossible. Likewise, a blue that is ultramarine at high concentrations appears cyan at low concentrations, allowing it to be used to mix green. Chromium red pigments can appear orange, and then yellow, as the concentration is reduced. It is even possible to mix very low concentrations of the blue mentioned and the chromium red to get a greenish color. This works much better with oil colors than it does with watercolors and dyes.
The old primaries depend on sloped absorption curves and pigment leakages to work, while newer scientifically derived ones depend solely on controlling the amount of absorption in certain parts of the spectrum.
Another reason the correct primary colors were not used by early artists is they were not available as durable pigments. Modern methods in chemistry were needed to produce them.”