PANTONE Guide to Communicating with Color
Feeling Color
“From negligees to sports cars to food, red stimulates all kinds of appetites — it is true that red literally can turn you on.”
By Leatrice Eiseman
The colors that we see are invariably influenced by what we feel. From the time of early infancy, when our eyes first perceive color, we start to formulate the feelings about those colors that invariable carry over into adult life. Some experts believe that humans have an “ancient wisdom,” that throughout eons of evolutionary history going back to the beginning of time, we have an associative memory concerning space, form, patterns, and colors.
Illustration © Jan Butler
Childhood memories are so involved with color that they are indelibly stamped on our psyches forever. We may not even be aware that we are remembering the colors associated with a specific incident, but the tape recorders in our heads are never turned off, and even into adulthood we continue to respond to specific colors in a positive or negative way.
Our cultural backgrounds and traditions influence our learned response and reaction to color as well. For example, Indian mystics believe green is the color that brings great harmony. If you (or your client) had been raised believing that green brings harmony, this color family would evoke positive responses however and wherever it is used.
Cross-culturally, there are some generalities that can be made about the human response to color, largely because of the psychological associations and physiological reactions to color that are universal. For example, why does red always provoke attention? Why is it that in every spoken language, it is the first color to be named after black and white? The psychological association that goes back to the beginning of time is the association of red to blood and fire, two very important elements that are necessary to sustain life.
Image © Don Paulson
Color Families: Red
The pituitary gland really springs into action when it sees red.
A chemical message is sent to your adrenal medulla and releases the hormone epinephrine. This alters your body chemistry, causing you to breathe more rapidly, increases your blood pressure, pulse rate, heartbeat, your flow of adrenaline, GSR — Galvanic Skin Response (a fancy term for perspiration and the basis of lie detector tests). These reactions are physiological, and we have no control over the effect. As a result, red is indelibly imprinted on the human mind to connect with excitement and high energy.
Warm tones are known as high-arousal colors and red, in particular, creates the highest arousal threshold in humans. So from negligees to sports cars to food, red stimulates all kinds of appetites - it is true that red literally can turn you on. In print or at point of purchase, red is virtually unignorable. It has an aggressive nature, commanding attention and demanding action.
Image © Don Paulson
When red tones are deepened to shades of burgundy, they still maintain the inherent excitement of the closest primary or focal “mother” color from which they came but are more subdued. The consumer responds to these wine tones as rich, refined, expensive; they see the shade as more authoritative, mature, lush, opulent, and elegant than vivid red.
