Colour is really really important in design. There are only 11 basic colour terms although there are MILLIONS of colours so it’s essential to spend some time looking at your colours and making sure that they create the right impression for your business. Here is the next instalment in the 11 colours series.
This month is all about yellow.
Yellow is generally seen as a happy colour. It’s cheerful and warm, friendly, uplifting and hopeful. It’s enthusiastic and optimistic. It’s also a highly visible colour which is one of the reasons it’s often used on road signage or with black on safety signs and on point of sale displays. It’s also great for anything to do with children as it stands out, it’s a primary colour and it exudes happiness.
Yellow is a great colour to paint a room where you need to concentrate, learn, take on board new knowledge and ideas because it stimulates the left side of our brains and helps us to take things in and challenge oursleves mentally. It would be great in a classroom or library. It’s also really good for helping with focus and remembering information.
If you suffer from depression or if your business is likely to make people feel anxious, then yellow is not a great colour to use as it can make you feel anxious or agitated. You need to use yellow carefully. Yellow is about self and self worth so if you have low self worth then it will make that worse. It’s also hard for older people to take in, so be careful of its use here.
If you’re needing to make a decision, then yellow will help you with clarity and focus. Yellow can help you to analyse everything methodically and come to a strong conclusion, although it can also make you be critcal and impulsive!
Yellow is a good colour to use in areas where you don’t want people to stay. It encourages people to move on which is why it’s often used in fast food outlets so that people won’t hang around. Next time you visit one take a look! You’ll probably see red too as that has the same effect, it’s an action colour, making people want to move.
Yellow is great for communication – for networking and PR, the kind of activities where you need to communicate on a mental level. Yellow can also be seen as entertaining and making people laugh.
This shows that it’s a very mixed colour with strong positive and negative impressions, so its use needs to be very carefully considered.