Do your font and colour choices really matter?
In short? Yes. For starters, your font and colours are core elements of your brand. That means you’ll use them in a lot of different places, including your logo, website, business cards and letterhead, social media graphics, and promotional materials.
While these details might seem inconsequential, they play an important role in how people perceive your entire business. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of psychology behind colours and fonts.
Get this: people make up their minds about products within 90 seconds, with 62–90% of their assessment based on colours alone. Colours also have staying power—you probably instantly recognise the bold colours of the Google logo or the Woolworths logo’s bright greens.
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung is considered the pioneer of colour psychology. He believed that colours carried specific meanings, and he identified six fundamental colour principles:
- Colour carries meaning.
- Colour meaning is based on either a learned meaning or something more innate.
- The perception of a colour incites automatic evaluation by the person perceiving it.
- The evaluation leads to colour-motivated behavior.
- Colour usually exerts its influence automatically.
- Context also plays a role in colour meaning and effect.
Modern interpretations of Jung’s theories attach emotions to specific colours. For example, red indicates excitement, energy and passion, while green captures nature, healing and freshness.
To put it simply, colour influences our thoughts—and this often happens subconsciously. Need proof? Fast food chains use colour to make you feel hungry. This is why McDonald’s, Hungry Jack’s and Oporto (to name a few) use red and yellow.
Of course, it’s not a perfect science—green can also represent envy, for example. But it’s worth remembering that the colours you choose will elicit certain emotions and perceptions whether people are consciously aware of it or not.
