Life According to Tom

Colors?  Remember your first box of crayons?  All of those colors. All with brand new points.  The big box of 48 was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me when it came time to draw.  It was real difficult to pick which color crayon to choose and use first.  Which one attracted your eye first?  Mine was always red.

So what is the first thing you see when you go to a website?  Color?  Content?  I’ll bet it’s color first, then content.  Color on a website plays a very important role in first impressions.

Well, now we have computer monitors that have millions of colors.  And most all see colors in a different way.  Depending on the brand of the monitor, the size, what type of hard drive it’s hooked up to, what color setting it’s set on and probably how much electricity it draws.

But most important is what color or colors does one use on their web site?  White – clean, innocent, pure, cold, empty, sterile; Red – strong, brave, passionate, dangerous, aggressive, domineering; Yellow- happy, friendly, optimistic, cowardly, annoying, brash; Brown – warm, earthy, mature, dirty, sad, cheap; Green – natural, tranquil, relaxing, jealous inexperienced, greedy; Blue – strong, trustworthy, authoritative, cold, depressing and gloomy.  This is a wide spectrum of colors and emotions.  Some companies even do focus groups to determine which colors work best.  First thing you need to know is what colors do not work on a computer monitor.  And that depends on the monitor, and your web development team will tell you that.

I had a client one time that was a horse racing syndicate.  They expressly asked for the color green for their printed brochure.  This was before the web started.  They said it was the color of money.  Well, yeah, sort of.  So is gold.  The real color of gold.  Back in those days, in print, listen to me “back in those days,” people would try and cheap out and use a color that looks like gold, it never did.  They tried the same with silver.  Never did either.

I used to work for an advertising agency that had only high tech medical equipment companies and high tech medical procedures companies as clients.  Through research we found that light blue was the color to use for our client’s mail projects.  We did a lot of direct mail back then, here we go again with “back then,” but it worked.  We received a 17% response on some of our mail campaigns.  People responded better to light blue when dealing with medical information when the paper of the mail piece was light blue.

Unless your company already has printed material and has consistently used a specific color and shades of that color for their advertising and mail, the best idea is to listen to your web development team’s recommendations, which will probably be – if your company has used a specific color in the past, the best thing to do is stick with it.  Except for red.  Red is an exciting color, but it is just too dominant in a sort of negative way.  (Unless you’re a Husker fan.)  And one should never use anything that is even remotely associated with negative about your product or service.

Black backgrounds with white type are kind of hard to read.  White backgrounds with black type are kind of boring.  Blue on blue, green on green, black on grey or maroon on maroon (text that is on the same color, or the same shade of that color, is really hard to read).  Blue text on a red background, or red text on a blue background vibrates – but it can be used creatively.

Now…where did my new box of crayons go?  Hijo!  Have you seen my new box of crayons?

No dad.