How the Colors and Fonts on a Website Can Affect Your Mood

By Dominic Beaulieu

A website has a number of specific functions that it must perform. Whether it will work depends on the work of the web designer. And the success of a web designer’s work will depend on whether the specialist knows the basics of psychology.

It would seem that there may be no connection between the web designer job and psychology. However, color, font, and layout can influence mood. Let’s examine this issue in more detail.

Web Design Requires Knowledge in Psychology

If you are close friends with a professional web designer, you probably realize that this is something more than filling the site with content and beautiful design. When a person visits the site, various feelings and sensations arise. And these feelings can be both positive and negative. Therefore, web design is also about psychology.

To achieve a good result, you should understand how to use each design element in the context of psychology. Just one color can push the visitor away from the site, while all other elements will be perfect. To avoid this, you need to understand this issue a little. Below you will learn about how web design tools change the mood of site visitors.

A Concise Dictionary of Colors

Most designers pay attention to matching the color set with the brand, but how many people think about how color affects the visitor? If you strive to create a high-quality design, it is necessary to take into account the wishes of not only the customer but also the associations that users will experience when interacting with a ready-made website. Here are the main reactions to colors:

Red

Red is a warm shade that can stimulate and cause irritation and anger. This color is associated with prohibitions and danger, but in the context of advertising is able to provoke a purchase. This is the main color that is used to attract the attention of consumers.

Orange

Orange evokes a feeling of well-being and places particular emphasis on impulsive people. Orange is capable of making decisions. It is recommended to use this color for educational, healthcare and children’s sites.

Yellow

Yellow this color is more likely to attract user attention than orange. This is suitable for sites of advertising agencies, children and travel.

Green

Green is a calming color, relieves the severity of experiences. Therefore, this color is used in areas such as:

• Healthcare
• Pharmaceuticals
• Veterinary
• Dentistry
• Ecology

Pink

Pink is able to enhance feelings and cause soft emotions. Most often, this color is used to attract a female audience and families.

Blue

Blue is the color of universal harmony and peace. This is the base color that does not cause irritation while maintaining harmony with other colors.

Light blue however, can help focus on a specific subject. The blue detail on the site will immediately attract attention and will not cause negative emotions. This color is very suitable for the financial industry where it is necessary to show stability and safety.

Violet

This color helps to abstract from all unnecessary and focus on the main subject. The ideal color for sites that relate to creativity.

Black 

Black is the color of self-immersion and fencing. It is not recommended to use this color as the main focus, but only for text and tables.

White

White is the color of openness and willingness to perceive. This color does not carry any negative feelings. It is used as a base color and in cases when you need to create a neutral effect without attracting attention to something specific.

These are the basic characteristics of colors. Remember that to accurately analyze what feelings this or that color will cause, it is necessary to look at it not only separately, but also in various color combinations. For a harmonious combination, you should use the color wheel, which will help not to break the harmony. It is also important to consider the types of colors.

For example, types of colors play a significant psychological role. Cold shades cause pleasant feelings, but in contrast, can cause negative feelings. With warm colors, this is the same case. They soothe and evoke a sense of creativity. But they can also provoke anger and irritation. In other words, the web designer needs to know the basics of colorization in order to correctly present the color and evoke the necessary emotions.

Layout: Look for the Balance

The organization of web page objects directly affects what a person will feel during the interaction. Of course, the organization of content is a priority, but you should not forget about the white space either. The more information you place on the page, the more likely you are to create tension and annoyance for users.

A whitespace is a place where the eyes and mind can rest. Usually, it should be on the edges of the screen and around the page objects. Otherwise, you should not count on the positive emotions of visitors. If a user visits your site and every centimeter of space is occupied by some word or subject, then this will be real chaos.

A simple and properly organized site that has adequate use of whitespace will appeal to visitors. At the psychological level, this will cause not only positive emotions but also a sense of care.

Fonts: Be Careful with Creativity

Not everyone thinks that the design of the text can cause a storm of emotions among site visitors. With such an affordable number of fonts, designers also have too large a choice of alternatives. 

However the broader variety of fonts available for brands to choose from gives them a lot of opportunities to make the site better. But what about website visitors? Truthfully, not everyone will pay attention to the uniqueness of the font, and if they do, it is not always from a positive point of view. Many site owners are faced with the fact that their unique font is annoying for users of the site and can lead to them to leave the site. Although the visitor may not understand what exactly they did not like and assume it was the content itself.

But this does not mean that you should not use new fonts. The point is that the font should not cause irritation to users and fully comply with the direction of the site. Font size and spacing also play a vital role. For example, text with a large line spacing looks airy and easy to read. But a text with a small interval creates a feeling of crampedness and causes difficulty in reading.

Conclusion

The color and layout of a site can play a key role not only in web design, but also in interior design and even in a combination of clothes. The psychological approach in web design is like Feng Shui in interior design. One wrong color or location of the object and success can be forgotten.

Using this psychological approach can create the desired effect you’re trying to achieve on your site. In fact, this basic information can be applied not only to sites but also to create logos and print ads. Use this information so that your site captures the attention of many visitors with just the right color, font, and layout.

About the Author

Dominic Beaulieu is an expert writer who specializes in creating various training and professional upgrade courses, materials and manuals. He mainly writes on development, digital marketing, design, business strategies, etc. This breadth of specialization allows him to write expert columns on the most pressing topics in today’s society and to specialize in creating  writing reviews in Pick The Writer and Writing Judge.