Color is an important part of our lives, but few people acknowledge the real power that color can have over our emotions. Most people react to color on an instinctual level and make important choices and decisions based on color without ever realizing it.
Because a person’s reaction to color is immediate and universal – many color messages are read the same around the world throughout most cultures – color should be a major consideration when designing a website. Color can be used to subtly suggest a message to site visitors and touch on emotions that lie beneath the surface.
If you’re designing a website for marketing purposes, make sure you understand the instinctual reactions people have to the color green. Green is a popular color in most cultures because of its natural association with spring, nature and the environment, growth and abundance
In the US the color green is often associated with money and wealth and in this way can be a good color choice for a website concerned with marketing a product or service.
Here are a few examples of websites that use green as their main color and the subtle associations they make:
Breeze
Breeze is a website selling an email campaign managing service – and the use of green here suggests that you might succeed if you use their service. Dark green is most often associated with money, but if used with too heavy a hand can convey jealousy and greed – very negative associations. This site does a good job of canceling out some of that negative association by adding lighter areas and small amounts of light green.
Sprout Box
Sprout Box invests in start-up businesses and though they are using green to suggest they can help their customers make money, they’re choosing to focus on green’s association with new, fresh, and growing – everything an owner wants their business to be. The color choice goes with a lighter shade of green to stay away from any suggestion of greed. The toned down green might be less colorful, but it conveys a degree of professionalism that start-ups are looking for.
Drop Bags
Drop Bags sells a cloth filtration bag used to extract oils from plant material – so their use of green is an obvious way to promote the fact that their product is environmentally friendly.
Frog Watch
Frog Watch uses green because of its obvious association with both the environment and the safety of frogs – their site topic.
Kidz Matter
Kidz Matter, which is a site for children involved in ministry around the world, uses a lime green that is associated with youth, vibrancy and excitement because they know it will be attractive to kids.
These sites all make effective use of the color green to convey their message to their target audience. Keep in mind that the tone of green can make a big difference. Olive green is often paired with peace – as in the proverbial olive branch – but believe it or not a lot of people think “70s” when they see avocado green because many kitchen appliances were avocado-colored during that era.
Sonia Mansfield is the content editor for PsPrint and editor of PsPrint Design Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company.
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