We’re back from a day’s break to bring you our first educational post! We’re covering the topic of colour psychology, an interesting topic. It’s very broad and can be daunting at first glance. Well, today we’re here to help you to better understand it, and also give some insight into the process of our progress.
Starting Off
What started off as a simple concept in our minds, turned into an extremely complex but interesting article for us to write through our research.
We looked first at Instagram carousels to ‘scope out’ the competition. And while most of them followed the line of showing a colour, then mentioning a quality, we felt that there was more to the entire process, more intangibles if you would; that it wasn’t as clear cut.
How was it possible that such a broad topic like colour had rules to it on telling people what to specifically feel and think? The thing is, we believed it wasn’t true.
So while we found the carousels to be pretty and aesthetic, they didn’t write what we felt about the topic as a whole.
Finding the catalyst
The process and direction of this educational post would change when we decided to turn to the internet, and not restrict ourselves to just Instagram. We looked through a few articles and then we found it; an article from HelpScout (right here) which we really believed in. There was a lot in this treasure chest of a post, but the main one was this: Context.
Of course, there were many other things within the article, but we’d focus on this one most.
The article helped push us and confirm in our minds our scepticism of how all the colours were so easily classified and depicted to portray one specific emotion group when we were thinking about how a colour like black could mean vastly different things to different people.
It could be a slimming colour to fashion designers, easily pairable with other colours; or it could mean an un-auspicious colour, like in Chinese culture where it’s shunned during celebrations.
This helped us reach a verdict & conclusion, that the classification of emotions to a specific colour is just to help us grasp an understanding of the vast plains of colour, and that really more of the work comes from doing one’s own research tailored to their target goal/outcome.
Creating the post
Now that we got our concept and that we’re all fired up, the next thing was to figure out how we’d present this. Completely writing off the conventional mentioning of colours seemed a bit too extreme for us, but we still wanted to talk about and sell our concept of how colour classification wasn’t the thing to follow, but a very vague guideline that was supposed to lead one to the right colours through their own time investment doing research to ‘clear a checklist”:
- Find out what kind of personality you want to exude
- To find the right audience
- Figure out the preference of that audience
After a bit of a discussion we figured we’d try to mention both the conventional colours portraying an emotion, but also create a storyline through each page at the same time to arrive at the end emphasising that if someone wants to get the right colour for the job, there’s more to it than just selecting a colour.
The problems in creation
The problems we faced while making the carousel were that trying to display icons while creating our storyline would be very space-constraining.
That would result in a lack of negative space for the post’s content to breathe. As a result, we decided to make the storyline rather simple but straight to the point; each part in each page would be a simple, connecting sentence that would flow through the entire carousel.
And with that, we reached the end! Do let us know if you liked the post and agreed with what we spotlighted in this post! Stick around and we’ll see you tomorrow for the next educational post!
