Color Matters in Branding
I recently read this article on Fast.co Design, where they're rehashing some branding color theory in a neat infographic. It reinforces how visual we are, and why the "fluffy" brand stuff actually matters.
I have a heavy background in performance marketing, so my habit is to look for marketing value through the lens of data. The creative/branding side of things is often difficult to measure. Difficult, but not impossible. Actually, I think the real issue is that data people end up in performance marketing and creative types end up in brand marketing, and the lack of overlap doesn't challenge the disciplines enough to come up with a useful, cost-effective solution.
"People make a subconscious judgement about an environment of product within 90 seconds of initial viewing. Between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone."
I didn't see it listed as a source on the infographic, but this reminded me of a Harvard study I read a while back, called "Predicting Users’ First Impressions of Website Aesthetics With a Quantification of Perceived Visual Complexity and Colorfulness." Be forewarned, this version is way less visual, but interesting if you want to get into the depths of the research.
What I love about the Harvard study, is that they are trying to create a model to measure and predict response to the visual experience of a website. We're always testing website efficacy in the marketing world, using CRO tools like Optimizely and Adobe Target to figure out what's most likely to get the action we want out of visitors. The difference is, this study is trying to find a way to predict the impression that visitors will have of a website, based on those subtle "fluffy" creative elements. Pretty cool.
"...ratings of appeal are significantly negatively affected by an increase in visual complexity....we observed a strong decrease in ratings of appeal for websites with a high level of complexity..."
In this study, they found that while color is important, the visual complexity factor has a bigger impact on customer impression. The age, gender and education level of the test subjects influenced their impressions. That's why we focus so much on our audience in the world of product and marketing, so no surprises there.
There is much detail about how they measure visual complexity, but in short, it's:
Clutter Creates Complexity
"...people perceive a higher complexity with denser and more dissimilar information presentation."
In other words, there are things that don't pair well together, including sizes, shapes, motions, color and luminance. Wherever these aren't working together in a complementary way, people are immediately distracted and find the page complex.
Lack of Symmetry Creates Complexity
This is about balance, equilibrium and symmetry. Think of it in terms of spacing, but also the colors used on the site. If these aren't balanced, people get annoyed. I think the spacing issue is more obvious, but a lot of people don't get the color issue. On this site, for example, I have black and white banner images. First of all, I like black and white, so there is some personal aesthetic going on here. But also, I'm not a designer, so I tried to come up with a way that I can easily repeat a process to get the same visual effect applied to each picture. Even then, you'll notice how they're kind of different, and if you didn't consciously notice that difference before, you probably did, sub-consciously, and thought...blah, something's off. This of course makes me appreciate the time our designers take to build that consistency. Much respect. It's not as easy as it may seem to be.
If you want to be a guinea pig for further study of website aesthetics, go to LabintheWild.org and take the ten minute experiment.