OpenLearning

Friday, 30 Oct 2015

Rommany O'Sullivan • Friday, 30 Oct 2015

How to Effectively Communicate and Influence Through Colour

Colour is a cue that gets your audience to see what you want them to see, feel what you want them to feel, and to do what you want them to do. How you use colour also affects the usability – whether people can read your content or not.

Colour has an impact on how we think and behave. It directs our eye where to look, what to do, and how to interpret something, placing content into context. It helps us decide what is important and what is not. That’s precisely why it is important to keep colour in mind when designing your course banner and thumbnail.

The Basics Of Colour Theory

Understanding how colour works isn’t just for artists, anyone using content marketing needs to understand the basics of Colour Theory, because you are using colour in your content.

Colour can be broken up into 3 groups.

The first is the primary colours, which are the three colours we need to make all other colours. They are red, blue, and yellow. These three colours can be used to create the next level of colours, called the secondary colours.

Secondary colours are purple, green, and orange. They are created using the primary colours. If you look on the colour wheel, you’ll find the secondary colors in between two primary colours.

red + blue = purple

blue + yellow = green

red + yellow = orange

And lastly the tertiary colours are taking secondary colours one step further. They are the “two-name” colours, such as red-purple, red-orange, yellow-green, etc. They are created by adding more of one primary colour than the other, creating not a true secondary colour but instead, one that is found closer to the primary colour.

Now that we have covered the colour basics, here are a few helpful tips on how to use colours for effective communcation.

1.Contrast is important when it comes to colour. Contrast is how one colour stands apart from another. It’s what makes text or objects distinguishable from the background. High contrast is when colors easily stand apart from each other. Low contrast is when they don’t. A lack of contrast may be the difference between a great banner and illegible one.

2. Pair your colours well, not all colours look nice together, so it is important to understand their relationships with one another.

3. Keep your colour palette simple, using 3 colours works best.

An easy rule to use is ; 60% – dominant colour, 30% – secondary colour, 10% – accent colour

4. Different colours have different meanings, how we interpret the emotional value of color depends upon our language, senses, and personality characteristics. There are however a few generalized understandings of what specific colours often mean to a large cross-section of people. Knowing some colour meanings is a useful thing to keep in mind when choosing a colour palette for your course.

If you’ve just discovered a new found interest for colours, you can delve a little deeper. There are more colours beyond the colour wheel, if you consider tone, shade and tint the rainbow is endless!

Once you have a basic understanding of colours, choosing your course colours becomes a lot easier. With these tips in mind, students will be looking forward to navigating through your beautiful courses in no time. Good luck!

15 Comments

Write a comment ...

Attach a file

About This Blog

OpenLearning is an online learning platform governed by a pedagogy comprised of student empowerment, authentic, active learning experiences, and community and connectedness. This blog covers:

1. The Educationist is an email publication driven by external authors sharing ideas, opinions and academic work on education discourse. All contributions within this category are licensed based on the author's discretion and written specifically for this blog

2. Shared know-how and first-hand MOOC experiences from the OpenLearning Team.

3. The latest news and education trends happening on the platform and within the online education space.

Back to Learning & Teaching Hub