The psychology of color has fascinated me since I was introduced to it in a college class in the early 1970s.
While I haven’t made it a topic of serious research like I did when I researched and applied the theories underlying the power of well-managed teams to transform an organization, co-creating managed change as the best means of turning a declining organization around, and organizational development and redevelopment for nearly 20 years, I have dabbled in color psychology from time to time in the 5 decades since then.
First in my study of color photography so I would know how to expose and process color slide and print film in my darkroom to achieve the results I wanted. And again in my study of the colors to use when building a website like this one.
While the psychology of color supports Marshal McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the medium is the message” applies to the symbols, such as our logos, we choose to represent us, I’m not certain it captures the essence of our verbal communication. When we speak, the elements which convey our message include everything from our words and the pitch / tone of our voice, to our body language and facial expressions.
In written communication the elements which convey our message include the words we choose, the order in which we place them, the emphasis indicated by text size and special fonts like bold and italic, and the white / negative space in our documents, to the very font we choose.
Where I agree with McLuhan 100% is that color is an important part of the message of business communication, especially in the graphics we use to represent ourselves and convey our message.
Consequently, I’ve chosen the colors of our logos to align with the emotion they evoke as a means of strengthening our over all message by using color to tacitly communicate the message of each site in our web hub in a way that supports our mission of helping the homeless and other marginalized individuals rebuild their lives.
Since this is neither the time nor place for an extended discussion of color psychology in business communication, I’ve simply included the table above about it.
Those who are interested in pursuing how color influences our business communications further will find the article it was published in here.
