Interior and graphic designers know how much colour affects mood. When you’re using a brochure maker or a poster maker like Easil, deciding on color is one of the most important decisions you need to make. Here are some tips to help you make your design work for you.
How to Choose Colors
Color psychology isn’t an exact science, so the definitions below are broad conclusions we can draw about colors. However, the culture and the personal experience of each person will also have an impact on how these colors are perceived. The color meanings shown below can be used as a guide, not a set of rules.
Color Meanings
- Red: Red is often associated with power, energy and passion. It’s usually a vivid color that grabs attention.
- Green: Green is the color of nature and renewal. It can bring up feelings of generosity and, in the proper setting, most people associate green with wealth.
- Blue: Blue is the calming color in most situations. Peace, unity and trust are often associated with blue, which is why you’ll find a lot of blue used in the financial industry.
- Purple: The association of purple with wisdom and enlightenment probably started back in the Middle Ages when European royalty adopted the color purple as their own.
- Orange: While the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the color orange may be autumn, orange also tends to symbolize energy, enthusiasm and flamboyance.
- Brown: Brown is often considered to be a masculine color, symbolizing the earth, outdoors, vitality and reliability.
- Grey: Grey is often perceived as subdued, and has associations with safety and reliability, but it can also provoke feelings of grief or old age, which is why it’s very often used as a background color that will not distract from the message a poster is communicating.
- White: In many cultures, white denotes purity, innocence and peace. However, in some cultures, white is the color of mourning. It can also be seen as cold and sterile. The other colors paired with white will have a strong influence in how the color white is perceived.
- Black: While black is the color of mourning in many cultures, it can also be perceived as being powerful, sophisticated and elegant. The context in which you use black will have an impact on how it is perceived.
Another thing to keep in mind is that shades of colors can often have very different meanings. For example, while a vibrant red is associated with Valentine’s Day to represent passion, pink usually symbolizes love. If you were promoting a lawn mower, you might use red to symbolize the power of the product, but pink wouldn’t be as effective.
Choosing a Color Palette
The next color challenge you’ll face is choosing a palette of colors. Let’s say you want to use green as your main color — of course, the entire design can’t be green, so you also need to choose complementary colors. There are lots of online resources that can assist you in making those choices.
Many of the online tools let you start with one color and then identify different combinations that work well with that color. Sometimes you may find yourself starting to design a new promotion that will incorporate an existing image or photo. In that case, you might want to use one of the tools that will identify a color palette from an image.
Once you know what colors you want to use, you can enter them in the Easil editor. Easil will keep track of those colors so that you can reuse them in different areas of your design. Experimenting with colors is fun and easy, so get started on your next design on Easil today!