Thursday, March 12, 2009

Colors and Banner Designs


When color is used correctly, it can add impact and clarity to your banner message. Color can emphasize, highlight, and lead your end users to a call-to-action (i.e. clicking on your banner). Color can also be used to trigger emotion.
When color is used incorrectly, it can compromise your message and confuse your target audience. The interpretation of a color depends on culture, physiology of the eye, readability, your target audience's profession or industry, and personal preference.

* Banner colors and target audience culture
* Colors and legibility
* Psychology of color
* Banner colors and ad placement

Banner colors and target audience culture
When designing a banner ad, you should be careful about the colors you select if you are targeting a specific country or a global audience. For example, though the color purple is also associated with royalty in European countries, the color orange is associated with royalty in the Netherlands. The color white is associated with death in China whereas white is associated with purity in Western cultures.

Colors and legibility
How the human eye processes color is also a consideration for selecting banner colors. Purple is one of the hardest colors for the eye to discern, so it might not be a good overall color choice. On the other hand, yellow is the first color the eye processes. So if you were t try and call attention to some text on a dark-colored banner, yellow can be an excellent color choice. But if you were to use yellow as a background color of a banner, you might want to alter the color so that it is less stressful on the eye.

In order to make the text on a banner legible, it is very important to use colors that provide a high contrast. Black and white is the two colors that provide the highest color contrast, but white banners tend to have the lowest click-through ratios (CTRs).

Psychology of color
The type of profession you are in should influence what colors you will select for your banner ad. In the finance industry, the color red signifies financial loss. In the health care industry, the color red is associated with danger or an emergency. So using the color red in the financial or health care banner designs would not be a wise choice.

Blues, teals, and greens tend to be safe color selections because many of their psychological interpretations include security, professionalism, reliability, conservatism, and technology. (Most web-savvy people know to click on the blue, underlined text link. So using blue in a banner design can help with CTRs.)

Banner colors and ad placement
Finally, when selecting colors for banner designs, it is extremely important to consider where your banner ad will be placed. You want your banners to stand out a bit from the sites they are being displayed in, but you don't want your banners to be so ostentatious and obnoxious that they conveys the message, "CLICK ME CLICK ME CLICK ME." Your banner ads should blend well with the web pages, and talented banner designers will always take that into consideration.

As you can see, selecting colors for banner ads is not as simple as using colors based on personal preference. Culture, readability, the psychology of color, and other factors are all considerations in designing banner ads.

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