Giving prints visual appeal often starts with color. Color is a foundation for expression, drives decision-making, and builds perception. But there's more to it than meets the eye.
Individual colors carry meaning and symbolism in design, influencing human emotions and behaviour. This concept is known as Color Psychology. It's used frequently in interior design, branding, and marketing sectors. Our interpretation of color combines our learned experiences (e.g., personal experiences, culture, nationality, etc.) and the biologically innate (information we inherited).
For those familiar with Color Theory, we use the color wheel to organize different hues. We can also divide the color wheel into warm and cool colors, helping us develop a visual hierarchy. This term means we can use color to direct and control the order in which viewers digest and process visual information. Warm colors include Red, Orange and Yellow and convey heat-like qualities, while Cool colors include Green, Blue and Violet and convey coldness.
We must also acknowledge the cultural implications of color. Understanding what colors mean in different cultures will ensure your prints consistently convey the right message, especially if your audience is global. For example, suppose a brand sells goods to a worldwide marketplace. The color choices must be cohesive and inclusive and reflect consumer buying habits to ensure the brand is accepted and regarded positively on the market. It will also pave the way for customers to recognize and recall your products, what you sell, and the values you represent, hopefully leading to customer loyalty.
Let's look at the meaning behind some colors in more depth:
Red
Red is one of the most intense, attention-grabbing colors in print. Dynamic and energising, it signifies importance and commands attention. In the Western world, it's often associated with love and passion. But it’s also linked to urgency, danger, and negativity. In Chinese culture, Red symbolizes prosperity and good fortune.
Yellow
Yellow is a bright, noticeable color that evokes joy, optimism and happiness. It's also linked to creativity and intellect and can be particularly effective when marketing products like Children's Books. On the other hand, Yellow is also associated with cowardice and can be used to caution and warn of potential danger.
Orange
Orange is a warm, energetic color related to activity, vitality, and extroversion. It supposedly has multi-sensory qualities in cooking and can evoke taste and smell, which is particularly effective for publications like Cookbooks.
Blue
Blue is a cool color known for its calming and serene qualities. Conversely, it can have negative connotations. The saying 'have the blues' is directly influenced by this color, signifying that someone is sad or depressed. But in branding, it can represent trustworthiness and professionalism.
Green
Green is symbolic of growth, health, and harmony. However, particularly in Western culture, Green can also be associated with greed, wealth and envy. But like Blue, it can be soothing, evoking stability and freshness. It often represents things related to health and wellness but is also synonymous with environmental and sustainability issues.
Purple
Purple can be an intense hue, signifying luxury, mystery, and, in some cultures, royalty. Historically, it was a color reserved for monarchs and high-ranking individuals due to the expense of obtaining purple dyes. Nowadays, it's widely known for conveying elegance and depth.
Pink
Pink is a versatile color, symbolising love, playfulness, and femininity. While it symbolizes romance, its soft and gentle qualities can also successfully denote youthfulness and compassion.
White
White is an adaptable, timeless color symbolising simplicity, tranquillity, and peace. In Western culture, white represents purity and new beginnings, but in Eastern cultures, it symbolizes mourning. In graphics, white can also suggest temperature and brightness.
Black
Black and its symbolism often shift depending on the context. In Western cultures, Black denotes mourning. It can also represent grief, evil, and depression. But Black can also be a highly sophisticated and elegant color choice, denoting authority, power and intrigue. Black can also be symbolic of non-conformity, strength and solidarity.
Gray
Similar to Black and White, Gray offers a sense of versatility, balance, and timelessness. Tonally, gray falls between Black and White, denoting neutrality and is a subtle, understated color. It can complement the background color in print or serve as a base for incorporating other, more vibrant colors.
Let's examine a couple of real-life print examples using the color psychology theory:
'Derpy Birds' by monkeymintaka
This Zine example has a pink background, hinting at the publication's playful nature, which may be more appealing to younger readers. The white text and graphics contrast in the foreground with the background color to ensure legibility, giving them an almost luminous quality. The bird's red-ish outline focuses the reader's attention, and the bright yellow beak provides a comical edge.
'On Valencia' by Nat Meier
This Photography Book example has an orange border background, denoting the exotic location and hot weather. The orange, however, appears subdued, suggesting that the book’s content is nostalgic and created with old-fashioned photographic methods. The warm orange also contrasts with the photograph’s pastel color palette, providing a pared-back look at a busy city.
Now you have an understanding of how color psychology works, let's equip you with some free online tools for all the color inspiration you need for future projects:
- CMYK Color Chart: create specific colors by adjusting the CMYK values.
- Canva's Color Palette Generator: test popular, premade color combinations or create bespoke versions. Alternatively, you can generate a palette from an existing image.
- Adobe's Color Wheel: build a color palette and test color harmonies. Once you've chosen your color scheme, copy and paste the HEX or RGB codes into your design program or choose from a range of ready-made schemes (but make sure you know how to convert RGB to CMYK). Adobe users can also save schemes to their account (Select a Swatch to save in your Swatches panel > click Save Swatches in the panel menu > Enter name and location for the file and click Save).
- Coolors: create custom palettes, explore trending ones or expand the color dimensions with their gradient generator. Color palettes can also be shared, saved and exported.
- ColorZilla and Eye Dropper: these color picker tools let you select and save colors when sampling colors from any image, allowing you to replicate them in your print designs.
Ultimately, color psychology is far more nuanced in practice. While our color choices are most likely influenced by social learning and, to a certain extent, our personal preferences, color psychology can be a guiding light in the creative process. So, as long as you know your industry, book genre and audience, color psychology can help you create prints where the first copy has as much colorful impact as the last.
For more news and inspiration, check out the array of posts on Mixam's Blog and visit our Support section for helpful guidance and advice on all things print.
Image and Artwork Credits: Freekpik (Cover), Picmonkey (color wheel), monkeymintaka and Nat Meier
