Believe it or not, the color in your web design can have a huge impact on how your website performs.  How we react to color varies based on gender, age, and culture.  Color evokes emotions, causing us to take action and make snap judgments.

In fact, Emerald Insight published a study titled “Impact of Color in Marketing” which found that color can impact 90-percent of the snap judgments consumers make about companies and products.  That’s a lot of pressure around selecting the right color!

To help you maneuver the color spectrum, we’ve put together a quick study guide on colors and how they impact web design and consumer behavior.

The Science Behind Color and Web Design

Your brain processes color in the hypothalamus region with assistance from the pituitary glands and thyroid glands.  Due to the way these three work together, color can produce a change in mood, judgment, or emotion.

It takes about 90 seconds for your brain to be impacted by color.  How does this impact your website? Well, if your web design has unappealing colors, odds are potential consumers won’t stick around to use it.  Same can be said for product design — no one wants to eat cereal from a box adorned with shades of vomit color brown, right?  Next time you walk down the cereal aisle, take a look around and check out all the bright, happy, and soothing colors and you’ll see, first hand, what we mean.  The colors used are very inviting to consumers.

Meaning of Colors

Now that you know how it can impact your web design, let’s do a quick rundown of the meanings, both good and bad, often associated with each color:

• White: Clean, purity, simplicity, sophistication, efficiency, sterility, coldness
• Grey: Neutrality, modern, depression, hibernation
• Black: Glamour, efficiency, substance, sophistication, menace, heaviness
• Yellow: Optimism, confidence, friendliness, creativity, anxiety, irrationality
• Orange: Physical comfort, warmth, abundance, fun, immaturity, deprivation, frustration
• Brown: Seriousness, nature, earthiness, reliability, lack of humor, heaviness
• Pink:  Physical tranquillity, feminity, nurture, warmth, inhibition, emasculation, physical weakness
• Red: Strength, physical courage, energy, masculinity, excitement, defiance, aggression, strain
• Purple: Spiritual awareness, luxury, authenticity, quality, introversion, decadence
• Green: Environment awareness, peace, balance, harmony, boredom, blandness
• Blue: Intelligence, trust, calm, serenity, logic, coldness, lack of emotion, aloofness

Not sure which colors will work best with your company’s website design or refresh?  Give us a call and let us provide assistance in selecting a color palette that will send the right message and engage your consumers.

Citation:

Satyendra Singh, (2006) “Impact of color on marketing”, Management Decision, Vol. 44 Issue: 6, pp.783-789, https://doi.org/10.1108/00251740610673332