What Color Should I Put Into my Business Card? Part One
If you've designed anything such as 90x54mm business card before, you have at least some knowledge of color psychology and the associations between colors and emotions.
Red means passion, blue is associated with calming, etc. We know yellow is a playful color, but why is it cheering?
One could easily say, “That's just the way it is,” but that would be too simple an explanation. Consider why!
If your emotional associations were innate with each color, they wouldn't differ from culture to culture. And they wouldn't change over time like pink was associated with boys at the beginning of the 20th century and with girls towards the end of the 20th century.
Color Psychology and Culture
Ancient people didn't see the same colors as you. In fact, people in other parts of the world don't see colors the way you do. It may seem strange, but it's true. Research has shown that language affects how we perceive colors.
A 2006 study found that members of the Himba tribe - a Namibian culture that has no word for the color "blue" - couldn't find the blue box in a circle of green boxes when you opened it, a computer showed. The blue box is evident to English speakers, but it was just another green box in the circle to study participants.
Some color connections may be explained by looking at where they appear in nature and what they meant to early people, such as red and brown. That, however, does not explain why black seems expensive and yellow seems playful.
Some associations have their origins in culture rather than nature. This is why color associations are not the same everywhere, and the meanings of colors can differ significantly in different countries and cultures.
In China and India, white stands for death and is worn at funerals. In the west, on the other hand, black. Likewise, yellow is the fun and happy color in the United States; it stands for courage in Japan.
The color associations within a culture can also change over time. Green, the color of rebirth and new life, became death in Europe during the 18th century.
Why? Because at that time, green dye contained arsenic, which led to death if one was exposed to this dye for a long time. Remnants of this association can still be seen today. Green is still sometimes associated with toxicity.
