Colour plays a tremendous role in establishing a company’s overall feel. By developing a specific palette, you can create a consistent look whilst tapping into people’s subliminal thought processes. This can not only affect the way that people choose to interact with your business, but can also be used to attract attention, express meaning, drive conversions and earn the loyalty of your customers. Choosing colours can take careful planning, however when implemented correctly, they can optimise the results in your business.
In this article, we will highlight some helpful tips for choosing colours that can best represent your technology company, express who your company is and gain the right reaction from your target audience.
Linking colours to concepts to best represent a technology company
In this blog post, we will take a closer look at:
3. Considering colour in website design
4.2. Colour concept terminology
5. Tips for colour implementations
1. Why is colour important?
Colour is one of the most powerful tools in a business. It plays a critical role as this is where the first impressions of customers are based. Colour is the key to producing good identity and is far more than just a visual aid. Colour conveys emotions, feelings and experiences, with 93% of consumers influenced by colours and visual appearance (Help Scout, 2018). People decide whether or not they like a product in 90 seconds or less, with 90% of that decision based solely on colour (99designs, 2018).
Colour is one of the single most crucial elements when creating a brand. Understanding the importance and influence that colour has on your technology business is key to producing a strong and cohesive identity. Colour initially conveys no meaning when it stands alone but connotes feelings and emotions that alter depending on culture, time, personal experience or gender. Furthermore, colour plays a major role in our visual perception and so a fundamental grasp of its perception in graphics and web design is critical in order to create a palette that evokes the right reaction from your audience. Moreover, it helps us to process and store images more efficiently than colourless (black and white) images. In fact, advertisements in colour are read up to 42% more than the same advertisements in black and white (Science Daily, 2018),
Colour is one of the most effective ways to convey a message or gain the attention of prospective customers. Roughly 6 in 10 people will decide if they are attracted to a brand; a decision is based on colour alone. In fact, colour increases brand and mark recognition by up to 80% (University of Loyola, 2017).
2. The psychology of colour
Colour has been known to have a powerful psychological impact on people’s behaviour and decisions, passing subtle messages about your brand. This knowledge can be implemented in marketing strategies and the overall design of your technology company to evoke certain emotions from your target audience.
Additional studies have revealed our brains prefer immediately recognisable brands (Science Daily, 2018), which makes colour an important element when creating a brand identity. When it comes to picking the right colour, research has found that predicting consumer reaction to colour appropriateness is far more important than the individual colour itself (Help Scout, 2018).
Psychologists have documented that colour does more than appeal to the senses. It boosts memory and addresses one of our basic neurological needs for stimulation. With all this at stake, knowing how to use colour is more important than ever before.
3. Considering colour in website design
Choosing a good colour scheme for your website could be daunting, especially if you are not confident about your colour coordination ability. However, choosing the right colours for your website is crucial for your success as they can be your most powerful tool to gain a reaction from your targeted audience. You can use colours to stir your visitors’ emotions or even draw attention to a call-to-action on your website.
Choosing an appropriate colour combination in the website design process is considered one of the most important elements in creating a successful website. Psychologists have revealed that people are susceptible on a subconscious level to colour impressions and that over 60% of acceptance or rejection of a website is tied to this very fact. (Science Daily, 2018), The choice of colour has the ability to generate a positive impact to the visitor and as a result, makes a visitor want to stay longer. It is a well known fact, that the longer a visitor stays on your website, the more chance you have of enticing them to take action. Judgement can be subconsciously based on colour schemes so your palette must not contradict your brands philosophy.
Moreover, colour is a compelling tool in graphic design. It can be used to emphasise elements, attract attention, evoke emotion, organise content and help designs to look aesthetically pleasing.
4. Choosing the right palette
Effective colour selection takes meticulous planning. When executed correctly, it can have a positive impact on how your visitors translate what they see on your website beyond its layout, typography or content. However, it can be difficult to choose the right colours if you’re unaware of how colour selection works. This is why you need to have some basic understanding of colour theory. Remember, when deciding on the appropriate colour for a website, consideration should always be given to your target audience.
4.1 The basics of colour
- Warm colours: Warm colours include red, yellow and orange. All three are warm colours since they have not been created by mixing warm and cool hues. Incorporate warm colours if you want to represent enthusiasm, interest or vitality.
- Cool colours: Cool colours include blue, green and purple. They are normally softer in comparison to warm colours. Add cool colours to your design if you want to represent tranquillity, harmony, or professionalism.
- Neutrals: Neutral colours like white, black, grey, brown and cream work well in any design backdrop but are often merged with more vibrant accent colours. However, they’re flexible enough to be used on their own, representing sophistication and elegance.
Here’s a quick reference to the standard symbolism of warm, cool, and neutral colours:
- Red: love, adoration, passion, anger, rage
- Orange: vitality, joy, energy, power
- Yellow: delight, hope, satisfaction, deceit
- Green: nature, success, prosperity, new beginnings
- Blue: peace, calm, sorrow
- Purple: luxury, royalty, abundance
- Black: mystery, class, evil
- Grey: reserved, old-fashioned, formal
- White: cleanliness, purity, virtue
- Brown: outdoors, modesty, trust
4.1 Colour concept terminology
If you’re going to use color effectively in your designs, it is essential to know the terminologies to colour, so that you can communicate effectively with your designers:
- Hue: Refers to the colour of the object. When you say red, yellow, white, or blue, you’re referring to the hue.
- Chroma: Indicates the purity of a colour. When designing, stay away from colours with high chrome similarities. Instead, choose colours with Chroma that are slightly similar or a few degrees off from each other.
- Saturation: Relates to how a colour is under a certain lighting condition. Colours with the same saturation levels result in a more cohesive-looking output.
- Value: Refers to the level of lightness or darkness of a colour. Out of all the colours and colour combinations, black has the lowest value while white has the highest.
- Tones: Produced when grey is added to a colour. They are often less vivid than pure colours. In most design choices, tones are very easy to use.
- Shades: Produced when black is put into a colour, turning it a lot deeper and darker. A shade is different from a tone or a tint.
- Tints: Created when white is added to a colour, making it lighter. Extremely light tints are often called pastels. Any pure colour mixed with white results in a tint.
5. Tips for colour implementation
Know your competition
It is not enough to just create a combination that is pleasing to the eye. Choosing the same palette as a competitor can create confusion among colleagues, customers and potential customers. Before deciding on your chosen colours, undertake a quick search online and look at what your competition is using.
Go further than just visuals
Although it is fine to use your favourite colours as an initial guideline, remember there is psychology involved. Colours affect people in ways they were not aware of and so it is therefore important to consider the ways that various colours translate.
Of course, these are just a few of the things you’ll want to consider when developing a custom colour palette for your technology company. If you’d like to know more, feel free to get in touch with our team of specialists.
