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What a traffic light can teach a designer
As a designer, it is self-explanatory that knowing your colour palette is crucial. Using the colours red, yellow and green will make certain elements stand out from their surroundings and probably lead to the desired effect. Or not.
They are not only preventing you from dying when you cross the streets.
Traffic lights are so incorporated in our everyday life that we react instinctively to them. We see red — we stop; we see green — we go. We don’t have to think about what those colours mean, they just give us an impulse, and we react to it.
As a designer, it is self-explanatory that knowing your colour palette is crucial. Using the colours red, yellow and green will make certain elements stand out from their surroundings and probably lead to the desired effect. However, UX design, of course, is so much more than just making a few buttons pop out and make the user click them. The user’s experience has to be crafted from start to finish. Guiding the user through the site, however, doesn’t always require insane visuals, bling-bling and a dancing unicorn. In the case of the traffic light, you can see that an entire communication process is made by only using three basic colours. The associations the human brain has crafted regarding those colours go far beyond “stop-wait-go”.
Basic colours and basic instincts
Let’s start with the basics. These colours have been chosen for a reason. They have to be understood immediately because — not to be dramatic here — your life depends on it.
Red — Warning and Intriguing
Red is typically associated with warnings, danger or the importance of something and is a highly visible colour. Not only traffic lights or other signs in traffic like the STOP-sign use this colour to say “no-no” and require your immediate attention. Just think about where the colour red is found in nature. Most people associate it with fire…
