Colours and Their Meaning

Blue:

  • trust, loyalty, honesty
  • one colour most free of cultural bias worldwide
  • not good colour for food as it is perceived as inedible
  • dominates seascapes but rarely seen in landscapes

Red

  • strongest colour that signfies danger, passion, power, lust, energy, excitment and love
  • favored colour for Chinese as it keeps evil away and means long life
  • active, competitive, daring, aggressive, and impatient

Purple

  • leadership, respect, weath, passion, magic, mysticism, mystery, ceativity, ideas
  • hardest colour to mix
  • light purple is fun and casual - suggesting springtime
  • dark purple is heavy and can be overpowering

Yellow

  • bright, gets attention - used for warnings
  • warm, playful, happy, inviting and stimulating
  • can indicate sickness

Orange

  • strong personality, confident, creative, adventurous, cheerful
  • grabs your attention
  • warmth, fire and flames, adventure, excitment
  • orange has the power of red but is less intense

Green

  • newness, regeneration life, growth, health
  • energy, faith, money (not universal)
  • most restful colour to the human eye
  • contentment, harmony, freshness, caring, moral and sensitive

Brown

  • sustenance, smplificy, comfort, quality
  • credibility, neatural, stability, harmony, renewal, history
  • Pink
  • most often used in confectionary
  • passion and purity, romance

Black

  • strength, determination, power, formailty
  • top of the line, class, mysterious
  • few logos are basic black
  • suggests evil and darkness

Grey

  • really classy, corporate
  • like black but less bold

 

Source: Blue is Hot, Red is Cool: Choosing the Right Colour for Your Logo by David Carter (2001)

More information on colours and their meaning.

Flat UI Color Picker is a great visual display of colours

HTML Color Codes

Why You Should Avoid Vibrating Color Combinations

25 Brilliant Uses of Colorful Spectrums in Web Design | Design Shack

9 places to get inspiration for your website's color palette - The Next Web 

BrandColors — a collection of major brand color codes 

Browse Palettes :: COLOURlovers

cColor Blender

Why Facebook is Blue

Colllor - Color palette the right way

Color Survey Results | xkcd 

color.hailpixel.com · Swatch you doing?

Colour Contrast Check - snook.ca

Colours In Cultures 

daylerees/colour-schemes · GitHub

Design for Hackers: Why Monet Never Used Black, & Why You Shouldn’t Either

Design Seeds®: For All Who Love Color

Flickr Flow / Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg 

Free For All: Art Box Photoshop Swatches | CreativePro.com

Free For All: Photoshop Brushes, Fonts, and Image Tools | CreativePro.com

Hex Color

How do colors affect purchases? Infographic

How to Choose Colors Everyone Likes | CreativePro.com

How to Get a Professional Look With Color

Pretty IP - By Strange

RGB Colorspace Atlas, A Cubed Book Depicting Every Color Imaginable

slayeroffice | tools | color palette creator v1.6.1

The Code Side Of Color | Smashing Coding

The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part II) | Empirical Zeal

Web Blog / All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts by COLOURlovers :: COLOURlovers 

What the Color?

Why Is Facebook Blue? The Science Behind Colors In Marketing | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Cohesive Colour Schemes

  1. Find the colors you want.  Don't worry about cohesion yet.
  2. Pick a color you want to tint everything towards (like yellow for energy)
  3. Overlay the colors with this tint and play with the blending mode and opacity til you get something to work with.
  4. Tada!  Cohesive color scheme created.

 

Read this article for more rules on creating website colour schemes.

Here is a site with Found Color Schemes.

Colour Tips

  • Red in product design suggests competition so leads to haggling, lower bids, or increased bids if a limitation is in place (i.e. limited quantity).
  • The correct yellow is important. Avoid yellow clothing - unattractive.
  • Yellow lures people to your door. Yellow lures them along - spend less time. Does this work for a checkout?
  • Eating more carotenoids gives skin a healthy colour.
  • Blue/red paper avoid, use yellow (ex. sticky note) as it triggers thinking.
  • Green is a problem colour in vehicles. Yet exposure to green enhances creativity; go view some nature.
  • Even a brief and a small amount of green. Green increases intrinsic motivation. Be more creative - use green paper. Sustained exposure to greenery is good.

This page contains information I gathered and thought were very useful. See more notes on design.

Just to let you know, this page was last updated Wednesday, Dec 11 24