Colors are powerful weapons that can create different feelings and emotions in our human life. Colors will impact on users in various ways such as emotions, to get their attention, to get them to the right track and most importantly to make a good perception in your brand. It is one of the key factors when it comes to design and mostly designers will use colors to highlight their product.

“All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites” — Mark Chagall

Basic color wheel

This is to show the relationship between primary, secondary and tertiary colors.

Primary colors on the color wheel are Red, Blue and Yellow.

Secondary colors are Violet, Green and Orange. These colors can be create by mixing two primary colors together.

Tertiary colors are Red-Violet, Blue-Violet, Blue-Green, Yellow-Green, Yellow-Orange and Red-Orange. Can make by mixing one primary color and its adjacent secondary color.

Tints, Shades and Tones

Warm and Cool colors

Red to Yellow in the color wheel indicate warm colors because they are mostly give us the hot feeling.

Violet to Green indicate cool colors as they are mostly remind us things which are related to environment.

Meanings behind colors

This will help you to understand how colors can influence on people to make decisions and how the impact that colors can have on our brains.

Red

Red is a very powerful color which symbolizes strength, power, danger, love and desire. In Design red is mostly used to get users attention.

One of the primary colors you can find in the color wheel, which is very aggressive, use as warning color and to show an error state but in the other side this is a color which you can play around bit to get some light red shades which matches the youth segment.

There are world famous brands which uses red as there primary color. For Example You tube, KFC, Coca-Cola, CNN, Netflix etc…

Blue

Blue is well known as the most preferred and most important color that is commonly used in design. It indicates the trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith and truth.

As the light blue represents water, sky which gives you the feeling of calm and relaxation as this is often associated with health, meditation and hence can be found in hospitals, health apps and fitness centers.

On the other side most of the financial products and social media brands use blue color to show that its a trustworthy, dependable, secure product, which will help get more users on their business.

Pay pal, Genie, Pay Here, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In etc…

Yellow

Yellow color is associated with joy, energy, happiness, confidence, positivity, light and warmth. If you overuse this color will become very disturbing.

Yellow can mix smoothly with black text rather than white text to grab more user attention.

Products that uses Yellow are, Mcdonald’s, IKEA, CAT etc…

Green

Green is the color of nature as it connected with environment which can grab users attention easily.

It is associated with meanings of growth, relaxation, harmony, freshness and fertility.

Lighter shades are mostly indicate the calmness and peacefulness while dark greens are linked with wealth and prestige. As opposite of red, green means safety.

Brands that uses green as their main color are Land Rover, Animal Planet, Whats App, Spotify, Sprite etc…

Orange

As Orange is a mixture of red and yellow it shows the creativity, cheerful, determination, attraction, encouragement and stimulation.

Orange suites best in Art, Entertainment, Food, Sports, Transportation Industries.

Fanta, Nickelodeon, Sketch App are using orange as their primary color.

Purple

Purple is the color of royalty and associated with luxury, ambition, wisdom, independence and magic.

Yahoo, Cadbury are examples for brands which uses purple as their main color.

Color does matter a lot in every aspect but there is no color identified as the best color because it’s contextual.