Hello fellow bloggers!
Today I'm going to share something with you that I've been pondering awhile. I keep changing my blog look because I'm never happy with my colours. That has partly been because I'm a pink girl, and haven't wanted to shout that out too loudly in case those of you who are deep, dark and serious take one look and run! Egad!
I've finally stopped toying with pink and embraced my favourite colour (which is closely followed by white and blue). I've worked up a collage for my new header which says it all - I love Pink. Hope you like it.
WHY DO BLOGGERS USE SUCH VARIED COLOUR COMBINATIONS FOR THEIR BLOGS?
Look around you at the different colours that represent various bloggers in the community. We have Roland Yeoman's black, Donna Hole's yellow, Alex J Cavanaugh's blue, J. L. Campbell's pinkish tones, Yolanda Renee's brown (now she's gone and changed some of it!) Somehow these colours just seem right for these bloggers. Why? If they read this, I hope they'll tell us!
Colour selection is one of the key elements of building a strong brand. Every colour has a different feel and associations. By choosing a colour or a combination of colors for your brand, you will take on those associations. Colours will evoke certain emotions and feelings towards your brand so it's vital to choose a colour that will represent your identity effectively.
There's been a ton of research on this topic, and I can but scratch the surface today. It has been shown that people make a subconscious judgement about a person, think...blog and other social media...within 90 seconds of their initial viewing. Between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on colour alone. Getting the message? Colour is HUGE!
WHY COLOUR MATTERS
Where to start? Colour symbolizes your product, in this case you and your social media presence. By combining the same colours (usually two or three), your brand will be recognizable on any social media, very useful if you have a product to promote.
Have you heard of the great new tool to help with color selection--Cymbolism? It’s an interactive survey of colour and word associations. Every page loads a new word, for which you have to select a colour you feel best represents it. You can see most popular associations either by colour or by word in the image below.
To help you select the right colour for your brand, here are the results from Cymbolism, and there are some examples of brands that use each colour:
Now do you think this chart represents your colour choices? I decided my pink (belonging to the purple spectrum) pretty much describes me -- romantic (and a little bit Victorian, haha), decadent (with my love of chocolate and other sensuous things in life), elegant, stylish (hmm...in my dreams)...but overall, pink describes my personality pretty much to a T.
Perhaps you align yourself with the brands who choose not to associate themselves with one colour. Instead of two or three colours, they choose four or more. This represents variety. These brands are usually platforms that host a vast amount of different applications or goods.
There are also two more colours that haven’t made it on the list: black and white. These are arguably not even colours, and they will go well with pretty much everything you choose. In Western culture, white is considered the colour of purity and peace, but in some parts of Asia white is the colour of death. However, cultural differences aside, on a social media platform white provides a clean background to add images/text to. (Many people prefer to read black text on a white background above all others.) Black is a heavy colour, but also complementary to many others. Used on a blog or other social media site it would suggest serious, deep and dark to all who come by.
HOW TO SELECT YOUR COLOUR
Look through the table above for a quick overview of what each colour represents. Of course, your opinion may differ. Some questions to ask yourself:
- What colour represents me--thus your brand's personality?
- What colour suits the characteristics of my product/service?
- What colour will give my readers the best impression the first time they see it?
You aren’t limited to one colour. Some brands like eBay choose to go with many colors to represent variety — but you can also choose a couple of colours that work well together. I like pink, white and blue.
In the competitive world of colour selection, it is often suggested you pick a different colour than that of your competitors. If you are a romance writer, for example, nothing says it like pink, (unless of course you write dark paranormal romance etc.) so you will have to find something edgy so you don't blend homogeneously into the background. Find something to make your pink more alluring than all the others.
If you're interested in further reading on this topic, I've found some links. I haven't checked all of them recently, so some may be dead, but here are some tools and resources you may find useful:
Articles and Resources:
- Color in Motion
- Veerle Pieters: Choosing Color Combinations
- Xerox Exchange: Choosing a Color for Your Business
- Why Color Matters
- Brand Identity: The Importance of Color
- Pallasart Web Design: How to Make Effective Use of color in Websites
- Elf Design: Choosing the Right Color Palette
Tools:
- Cymbolism
- Adobe Kuler
- COLOURlovers
- I Like Your Colors
- ColorJack
- DeGraeve Color Palette Generator
- Color Combinations
Dimitry Fadeyev, A Guide to Choosing Colours for Your Brand, 2008
- What do your colours say about you?
- Did you find this post helpful?
