If you are one of those organizations which find success packaging and promoting their shows as part of seasons, you may be looking toward the design of promotional materials for your upcoming year.
With that in mind, it seems like a good time to point out this article on the Psychology of Color that appeared about a year ago on the Entrepreneur website.
(Though you don’t need to have a subscription campaign to design for this article to be of use to you.)
The article does a good job of addressing all the ideas people have about what color means, what colors best appeal to different genders and which are best used for calls to action.
The author, Gregory Ciotti, essentially says most of the assumptions and theories are complete bunk. People bring too much of their personal and cultural experiences to colors to be able to attribute an consistent, specific emotional reaction to them.
It is better to try to pick colors that will generally align with your brand personality rather than to evoke a specific feeling with a color. Context matters more that just about anything else.
Certain colors DO broadly align with specific traits (e.g., brown with ruggedness, purple with sophistication, and red with excitement). But nearly every academic study on colors and branding will tell you that it’s far more important for your brand’s colors to support the personality you want to portray instead of trying to align with stereotypical color associations.
Consider the inaccuracy of making broad statements such as “green means calm.” The context is missing; sometimes green is used to brand environmental issues such as Timberland’s G.R.E.E.N standard, but other times it’s meant to brand financial spaces such as Mint.com.
And while brown may be useful for a rugged appeal (think Saddleback Leather), when positioned in another context brown can be used to create a warm, inviting feeling (Thanksgiving) or to stir your appetite (every chocolate commercial you’ve ever seen).
Bottom line: I can’t offer you an easy, clear-cut set of guidelines for choosing your brand’s colors, but I can assure you that the context you’re working within is an absolutely essential consideration.
One thing that may or may not enter your consideration of color is gender. There is a difference in color prefer between males and females. Given that women often drive the attendance experience, it may be useful to cater to women’s color biases.
(Though you should probably avoid anything that runs strongly counter to male biases lest the sight of a brochure or webpage entrench their resistance to attendance.)
Additional research in studies on color perception and color preferences show that when it comes to shades, tints and hues men seem to prefer bold colors while women prefer softer colors. Also, men were more likely to select shades of colors as their favorites (colors with black added), whereas women were more receptive to tints of colors (colors with white added)
The last thing that Ciotti works on debunking is the idea that a specific colored button on a website increases the number of purchases. He says rather it is the isolation effect making that button highly noticeable on a webpage, even if you have poor eyesight, that helps create a call to action.
So a red button on a page with a lot of green is more successful than a green button on that same page. The same is true with a mix of color and font size.
The article has a lot of infographics and images which illustrate his point so if any of this sounds interesting, it is worth a visit to the article.