If you have a new business, you have to select a colour that represents its identity. According to colour psychology, people’s purchase decisions and relationship with a brand are influenced by that brand’s identity colours. The top picks for various online businesses include orange, blue and green, which is why you need to find out if they can work for your website design too. Curious yet? Read along.
Colour Power
The majority of buyers will pick a product depending on that brand’s colour (even though this sounds like what a kindergartener would do). The explanation is fairly simple: colour is closely linked to brand recognition. If a brand is reputable on the market, more people tend to perceive it as trustworthy.
But colour is tied to online conversions too. It’s known that good website design can influence shopping decisions, and the overall look of your website is influenced by your choice of colours. Besides, as stated by the Australian website design company Magicdust, we process visual elements much faster than text and so the majority of people who don’t like how a website looks, don’t visit it again.
1. Blue
This is a top colour for many brands because so many people prefer it, while almost no one seems to dislike it. It is also associated with the colour of the sky and the ocean, inspiring trust, calmness and authority. So, if you want your audience to trust you and see you as a figure of authority in your field, blue is more than a safe bet. Many online businesses have chosen a shade of blue to represent their brand, including big brands like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Citibank and Walmart. Blue is linked to the rational mind and communication, which is another reason why many social media companies use it. Banks, insurance companies, online media agencies and research institutes all want to be perceived as trustworthy, so they use a blue-dominant colour scheme.
2. Green
Green is associated with new life and growth, considering that green is the colour of emerging buds. The other advantage of green is that it’s very easily processed by human vision. In turn, this leads to green being perceived as a natural and healthy colour. If you want your brand to be associated with the concepts of health, growth, new beginnings and a natural lifestyle, green is definitely a colour you can rely on. Besides, if your company is tied to nature, eco-friendly products or food, green is definitely the way to go. Many big brands have chosen green to give voice to these values, such as Subway, Starbucks, Android, BP and Green Giant.
3. Orange
Orange isn’t as safe as the other two contenders above, according to colour psychology, which actually associates orange with risk. That’s possibly caused by various orange objects in our environment that signal danger, such as orange cones or orange hunting vests. Besides, many Halloween symbols are orange. So when can you use orange for your brand? If you want to imply that you take calculated risks, which make your brand vibrant, exciting and full of energy, you’ve found your colour. You can also successfully use orange for call-to-action buttons, considering this colour means “pay attention”. Harley Davidson, Hubspot and Home Depot are among the famous brands that have picked orange to emphasise certain elements in their website design.
However, orange has some negative connotations. Most people associate orange with good value, which is great if you sell affordable products. For high-end brands, though, this might just mean they’re selling things that are too cheap. Others feel that orange may have vulgar origins, so it’s a bad idea to link it to brands that want to project a sombre, upstanding image. If you want to show you’re dependable, but with a playful nature, you can use orange as a secondary colour in your logo, without making it the primary colour of your website design.
In Conclusion
It is key that designers understand the important influence that colour can have on your website design so that possible embarrassing mistakes can be avoided. Once you have chosen a colour to represent your brand, you can rarely go back as the audience has associated you with a certain concept based on your dominant brand colour.
If you want to show your brand is reliable and want to be liked by a very diverse audience, use blue. Green is the best colour to emphasise renewal and life, while orange is the colour of energetic risk-takers.