Psychology of Color in Web Design
Posted by Sandy in 
The colors you use on your website can greatly affect the mood of your visitors. By understanding the psychology of colors, you can easily improve your web site design, create a memorable brand, and increase your conversion rate.
You only have one chance to make a great first impression and capture the attention of your website visitor. Once you’ve got their attention, what does your site move them to do? Are they moved to explore further or purchase your product? Your choice of colors can be of influence to your site visitors. Here is a very brief summary of the perceptions and emotions colors can convey:
Red is mostly associated with boldness, excitement, strength, power, passion, determination, and courage. Red increases the heart rate and creates a sense of urgency, as often seen in clearance sales.
Orange radiates cheerfulness, warmth, energy, enthusiasm and creativity. Orange creates a call to action: buy or subscribe.
Yellow is a clear attention-grabber and mostly associated with liveliness, happiness, comfort, and energy.
Pink is usually associated with femininity, romance, tenderness, and has also been shown to have a calming effect. Pink is often used to market products to women and young girls.
Purple has traditionally long been associated with power, nobility and wealth. It is also strongly associated with wisdom and spirituality, as well as magic and mystery. Purple is often seen in beauty or anti-aging products.
Blue is one of the most liked colors, especially by men. It is linked with depth and stability, professionalism, security and trust, as often seen with banks and businesses.
Green is the color of nature and everything natural. It is identified with safety and optimism, health, durability and reliability, harmony and freshness. It is a calming and stress relieving color. Green is also associated with wealth, and is the easiest color for the eyes to process.
Brown is a reassuring color of endurance, relaxation and confidence. It can also portray comfort, strength, credibility, and stability.
Gray provokes feelings of conservatism, traditionalism and seriousness, security, reliability, and maturity.
White signifies purity and innocence. Further associations are cleanliness, freshness, newness and simplicity.
Black is, especially in design, an elegant and stylish color which can imply sophistication, power, and strength, or provoke feelings of mystery. It is often used to market luxury products.
You can use the above as a guide when choosing colors for your website, logo, or marketing material. It really boils down to your target audience and what psychological message you want to convey in colors.
