A Question that MIGHT Open Your Eyes - Color Themes?

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ScottDaMan

ScottDaMan

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I am developing a couple templates for a few domains I bought the other day. They are all dieting related domains.

So I did what I normally do and went to kuler.adobe.com (found by suggestion here at WF) for a good color scheme. Only this time, I paused and second guessed myself.

Do any of you consider the colors of your themes based on what the site will be?

In this case, they are dieting related sites. So I did a little color research and found this snippet
In fact, think of a few fast food restaurants - McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, KFC. Which color is prevalently featured in each of these fast food restaurants' logos? Red. Because it stimulates the appetite.
Click to expand...
. Interesting....

So for dieting templates, do I do the right thing and use "weight loss colors" that are "known" to suppress the appetite (apparently blue and purple - relation: poison)? Or do I do what I think might actually convert more sales? Use appetite stimulating colors like red?

What would you do? Surround the site in nice blue/purple colors and put the offers in red borders? LOL

Any of you ever worry about this shit?
 


I think green and orange would be good for weight loss.
And my first thought about purple was noo. But apparently some top ranked sites use purple. Check top ranking sites for weight loss what they use.
But I wouldn't use red.
 
Yes, I do worry about colors a lot.

I have a women's site, and my colors are purple and blue. However, on one area I chose a deeper blue with a tan background. The reason is because of the mood it sets. It's a serious section with medical information in it, I don't want to put glitz or anything bright into it. I look at colors like I look at text in my landing pages. They set a mood.

I love design, and sometimes the design element is more enjoyable to me than writing the copy.

I'd use the red. Make people hungry, and if they just ate that gives them even more motivation to find a way to control their eating. Put pictures of pie and burgers, make them drool. Then at the end put a picture of a skinny person. Willpower stinks, and when someone is drooling and hungry I'd bet they'll buy a product to look like the skinny person (after they eat their burger of course).
 
i'm currently developing a weight loss website, and I noticed during my research that the majority of weight loss sites use a blue color scheme..

I was planing on using blue as well.. but your idea about red is interesting.. i think i'll do 2 different version and split test..
 
Colors can play a role, its subliminal marketing, kind of the post Jon made on his blog with all of the bla bla bla bla bla go to wicked fire bla bla bla bla bla.

Offline companies have been doing it for years, every walk through a mall and catch a smell of something amazing, something where you think hmmm where is that coming from? Ever find the store where it was coming from?

For a long time marketers in the offline stores have tested various methods like these to figure out which ones work the best (Yes the smell tests did drive up sales for some people), its only reasonable that things like colors that attract would work well for different types of websites.
 
Much respect to Juicify, I went with green and orange. Now the site looks like sweet jolly ranchers, come in and taste my diet programs.

Doesn't really matter too much, I plan to PWN Aequitas with my thousands of sites anyways... I'll try red on another one and purple on another. It's all in good fun.. I mean.. CASH..
 
I'd definitely play around with oranges, greens and light blues on a white background, blues if it's more of a facts/stats site, orange if it's an exercise site.

Random color facts: fast food chains often serve salads and other to go items in black trays to make the portions seem bigger, and four or five star restaurants use large, white plates to connote small portions and elegance, so you fill like you're eating appetizers for each course until voila! The dessert is gone, and you're not hungry or overly stuffed.

Incidentally, I hate it when brick classrooms have cheaply painted baby blue walls. Makes me depressed AND sleepy. Fucking public school budgets.
 
Smart move on the orange, one of bigger dieting sites recently uses the orange... and I will admit I am a member... but beyond that check out eDiets.com. That site has a great and easy layout for the amount of info they offer.
 
ediets, hmmmm, notice the large red block ad for the "eDiets Now Delivers"? Coincidence?

BTW, this is a new type of diet site. I like trying to be new and fresh.. I don't copy shit. If my ideas work, I hire further development and expand.. just like how digg got started.

Thanks though, appreciated. This jolly rancher theme looks fucking good.
 
Dambit ScottDaMan,

Ever since I read this thread hours ago I have not been able to stop thinking about it, I'm going to have to write a blog post about it or something to get out some of my thoughts, there are a lot of em on this topic.

I know a few things here and there about using colors on your sites but I never really took the time to actually test those colors, you know you spend the time to split test everything else but I for one never seem to actually split test the different colors on my site.

Not only that subliminal marketing is just a whole lot more fun cause you really begin to get creative and try crazy things.
 
I am definitely curious about this stuff. :) Here are some links for you that I had saved!

brand: Color guidelines for brands
Color Matters - Business, Marketing and Trends
Web Page Design for Designers - Colour

Hope that helps you decide! I haven't looked into dieting color schemes much, but I would check out the top dieting sites (ie. jenny craig or weight watchers, etc.) and see what they do. I bet they have done all the color and psychology research already.

Oh, actually, I did have this bookmarked for some reason that I can't recall: Usability News - 6.1 2004 -- What’s the Skinny on Weight Loss Websites?. That offers some ideas on designing for the overweight surfing crowd.

Laura :)
 
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Laura said:
I am definitely curious about this stuff. :) Here are some links for you that I had saved!

brand: Color guidelines for brands
Color Matters - Business, Marketing and Trends
Web Page Design for Designers - Colour

Hope that helps you decide! I haven't looked into dieting color schemes much, but I would check out the top dieting sites (ie. jenny craig or weight watchers, etc.) and see what they do. I bet they have done all the color and psychology research already.

Oh, actually, I did have this bookmarked for some reason that I can't recall: Usability News - 6.1 2004 -- What’s the Skinny on Weight Loss Websites?. That offers some ideas on designing for the overweight surfing crowd.

Laura :)
Click to expand...

Laura,

Thanks for those other resources the more I read and look into this stuff the more fun it gets, the creative mind just starts going crazy with new ways to test campaigns.

+rep.
 
Laura said:
I am definitely curious about this stuff. :) Here are some links for you that I had saved!

brand: Color guidelines for brands
Color Matters - Business, Marketing and Trends
Web Page Design for Designers - Colour

Hope that helps you decide! I haven't looked into dieting color schemes much, but I would check out the top dieting sites (ie. jenny craig or weight watchers, etc.) and see what they do. I bet they have done all the color and psychology research already.

Oh, actually, I did have this bookmarked for some reason that I can't recall: Usability News - 6.1 2004 -- What’s the Skinny on Weight Loss Websites?. That offers some ideas on designing for the overweight surfing crowd.

Laura :)
Click to expand...


I just used the suggestions in the first link for a campaign promoting a health product. I used a green link, it's supposed to evoke tranquility and health. I hope it also evokes spending!
 
As a designer, I've been doing a lot of research into color lately, too. Aequitas has a good blog post about it. Worth a read. You can read it here: http://principleofmarketing.com/subliminal-marketing/

It's fucking amazing what different color schemes are able to accomplish. After reading Aequitas's blog post, I've been split testing one of my campaigns using colors as the only variable. Each landing page uses a different color scheme and so far, the Green and Black combination seem to work best, while the plain black and white is performing the worst. Interesting.
 
Thanks for the link MyOwnDeamon,

I remember when I was in college for Computer Science we had a short course on web development and they got us to use the color pallets, you know the wheel with Green, Red, Blue colors to make a billion other RGB themes, I should have known back then (5 years or so now) that color themes would make me curious in the future haha.
 
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