Using Psychology in Web Design: How Colors Effect Your Audience

Amazing website design is about more than simply delivering wonderful content to your audience on a page that is formatted to be visually appealing. When visitors arrive at your website, they will experience a set of feelings and emotions in relation to your brand and the factors that have been used to organize your various pages. The type of feelings that your website produces is completely down to you, and should never be ignored when it comes to creating the ideal marketing strategy. Fortunately, over the years, more information than ever before has emerged regarding the different aspects of design and the way that visuals affect the psychology of viewers. One of the most effective ways of helping your audience to get the right impression of your website, and your brand, is by using color.

The Basics of Using Color

When designing a website from scratch, the colors that you decide to use will typically be determined by existing visuals associated with your brand. For example, if you already have a brand logo that utilizes the colors green and blue heavily, you might focus on the same hues throughout your website. However, how the colors you choose make your visitors feel when they click onto your website will depend on how they are used.

Most of the time, neutral colors such as whites, greys, and blacks are used alongside primary colors in a website. When it comes to modern design techniques, the neutral colors typically take up more space on the page. For example, if the main colors of a company are green and blue, and the neutrals are white and grey, the chances are the background on which content is displayed will be white, rather than green or blue. Too much color in one space would be overwhelming and impossible to focus on, which is what makes neutral color so important.

The Psychology of Color

The colors that you use in your web design can also have a psychological effect on your viewers. For example, gentler colors such as green, blue and purple can provide a relaxed and professional feeling, or alternatively used to give a cold and unwelcome atmosphere. Warm shades such as yellow, red and orange, can be soothing and creative, but also provide negative feelings of stress and anger.

The way that you use colors to convey positive feelings will depend on the huge, tint and shades of the color you are using, as well as how much of that color you choose to use. Generally, if you want a website that is inviting, open and creative, you should design pages using a combination of green and blue on a white background, with splashes of yellow and orange.