#research_brand

[thesaltboy]

A Little Colour Theory

Considering the brand of our learning platform, I started thinking about colour. During my research I noticed there was a heavy attraction to the color blue.

You can take a look here at this article on Smashing Mag to read a little about colour associations.

Here are a couple things I noted during my research:

Blue is by far the most commonly used color. Blue is often associated with reliability, knowledge, and trust. It’s soothing and calm. Lighter blues have more energy whereas darker blues are often used for corporate branding because they give a feeling of strength and reliability.

Green is used quite a bit but less often than blue. I noticed that platforms that were targeted towards a younger or beginner audience used more green. Examples include Khan Academy (and Khan Academy Kids), freeCodeCamp, and Edabit.

Yellow is often used as accent colours. I reckon that’s because it goes well with both green and blue. Yellow is one of the most energetic colors, which works well for buttons and call-to-actions.

The more expensive and professional platforms stayed away from high energy colors like yellow and red, except in buttons and call-to-actions.

Generally, the more money the course costs, the less colourful the branding is. This makes sense, if the branding gives off too childish a vibe I’d be less likely to give the company my money.

What does this mean for our product?

Depending on our target audience, the branding of our product and company will change. As things stand now, we will probably be targeting a slightly younger audience, people in their 20s and 30s. These people will likely have little to no formal education on design. We want our brand to be energetic but respectful, so we’ll probably stay away from darker colours. We don’t want to come off as corporate or distant.

I’m a big fan of the warmer colors here. Yellow and orange are high energy, but are offset by the cool blue colour. A sort of greeny blue has the best of both worlds, and it balances the energy of the yellow. These combinations steer clear of the average cool, corporate look plenty of other online learning platforms give off.

The pink is a bit of a weird one. It’s not something I would associate with a learning platform. It’s a little left-field but I thought I’d try it out. To be honest it reminds me more of a candy shop than an education site. I’ll probably skip this one.

These are pretty run of the mill combos. The main color is blue, which is strongly associated with learning and reliability. The secondary color here is doing the heavy lifting as far as personality goes. I still really like the blue/yellow combo.

If I had to pick one or the other, I would choose a yellow as the main brand color, and blue as the secondary color.