Keith Martin

Colour plays a crucial part in how we perceive things, so understanding its emotive effects is fundamental to creating standout designs.

How do you react to colour? The hue of things has a surprisingly strong effect on how we perceive things and even on how we feel, both physically and emotionally. It’s thought that both the ancient Egyptians and Native American Indians used coloured light and coloured objects to treat illnesses. Whether that works in the straight medical sense is debatable, but it’s clear that colour is deeply important to our feelings.

Some of our reactions to colour are specific to our social environments; these can be different – sometimes surprisingly so – in different parts of the world. Other responses seem to be more fundamental, probably because they come from universal constants – the blue of a calm sky, for example. As designers we should know all this implicitly, but as busy people we often take this sort of thing for granted and forget to factor it into what we make or do. So how about a little exploration into colours and their meanings? It won’t take long, I promise.
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