It’s easy to think that web designers use color to make the sites they create look really great, and that would be true. As long as they’re used smartly, colors do bring the best out of any website.
Colors, however, aren’t just there to make a web design look pretty. Most, if not all, web designers know what marketers and advertisers have been doing all these years: humans have specific responses to color stimuli, and that knowledge stemming from a certain branch of psychology has been serving them well for some time now.
Color psychology is all about the human behaviors associated with the items in the color wheel. According to its proponents, all humans generally react to various colors in a certain way. These behavioral associations are what marketers and web designers take inspiration from when creating their materials, and by all indications, doing so is proving to be effective.
Red, for one, has been used in practically all marketing materials that announce sales with huge discounts for a limited time only. People typically feel a sense of urgency when seeing such ads, and more often than not, spur them to action. Color psychology regards red as the color of passion, and our natural reaction to ads in their full crimson splendor is a quite passionate one.
Blue, for another, is quite popular in the business world. After all, it’s associated with stability, intelligence, trust, security, and reliability, qualities which businesses would very much like to project to their customers. Facebook, one of the top websites in the world, has the color blue all over everything it does.
If you’re a web designer and you want to get a better idea of how you can use color psychology in your work, just check out the infographic shown below.