image of colored pencils | color affects everyone

Color Affects More Than Just Things

How does color affect your SEO ranking? Here’s a thought experiment. So, you’re out shopping and you find this awesome new bicycle.  It has an awesome slick design, great gears, light-weight, and a great price!  It’s the bike you’ve always been looking for your whole life.  Oh, and it’s hot-pink?  Unless you love hot-pink, chances are you’ll be disappointed and not buy it.  Why is that?  It has all the latest and greatest necessities, but you chose to not buy it.  All because of its color.  This is where color psychology comes in.

What is color psychology?

You may be asking yourself what is this color psychology all about and how does it affect you. Color psychology is the study of color and how it influences someone. It’s a well-known topic of conversation, but a less explored study of how our brain perceives what it visualizes. Because there is little research on the subject, it’s somewhat difficult to precisely pinpoint the question itself of how it affects people. Although, knowing that color is a driving force does help in our decision factor, which sometimes may be influenced by society as well as oneself.

How does it affect you?

Color is subjective and depends on the emotional response triggered by the visualization of what the person sees. Not only does color influence how one reacts to it, but also how one will be perceived with a certain color; society plays an influential role as well. This in turn drives the market and how companies and organization market themselves. Even though you may not think much about it, color controls your life and how you influence others as well.

Color psychology all around us.

As mentioned, these nuances of color, society and oneself controls or helps a company how they will promote their image, values and ultimately their products or message. By using color as a tool and the psychology behind it helps to understand how their product or message will trigger an emotional response and in the end whether or not the person will choose to act on the call-to-action, be it to purchase something or participate with an event. Knowing that emotions is what drives people to act, color and color psychology can be a very powerful tools.

Color, Marketing and You!

Emotions are the end target and color is the avenue to get to them. Emotions are the driving force to a call-to-action result. That is one of the reasons why color is very important when it comes to graphic design and marketing. Just as color plays a big role, so does the coordination of it by applying the fundamentals of graphic design. If there’s anything that one should take away from the theory behind color psychology it is that no matter where you are at, color will ultimately play a role on your decision making. Next time you see something you like, ask yourself how the color of it makes you feel about it.