Blue is the colour of the intellect, the mind, making it the colour of communication and when you think about social media, it’s all about communicating.
Blue also has the perception as being trustworthy, dependable, safe and reliable. These are the perceived positive qualities of a business who chooses blue.
Because our project is using a Twitter feed I started looking at the colour physiology of the colour blue. It is used in the logos of all the major social media platforms. This is not to suggest that our object will be a social media platform, but rather to draw the meaning from the colour and use it to reinforce our idea. The particular shade of blue was not a direct colour associated with any of the big social media companies but would be closest to Facebook. However, I don’t think this is apparent when only viewing it as text.
I wanted a light font as well to visually match the word “light”. This reinforces the meaning and visually carries a meaning of purity without being to heavy handed about it.
If you contrast the one above with this image the meaning is different. I nearly settled for this font but the weight of the font is much to heavy for the message that is being conveyed. It visually contradicts itself so I choose not to pick this version.
Yellow
This color relates to acquired knowledge. It is the color which resonates with the left or logic side of the brain stimulating our mental faculties and creating mental agility and perception.
Being the lightest hue of the spectrum, the color psychology of yellow is uplifting and illuminating, offering hope, happiness, cheerfulness and fun.
Yellow of course is the colour that Pieta House use in their Darkness Into Light campaign. That yellow is much to bright for the poster as I fear it could potentially saturate the poster to the point that it will be unreadable. For that reason I used a more muted tone. I also tried changing around the image and use white instead of the yellow but it didn’t look as good and was more unlike something Pieta House would use.
We also did a user test on the new object that we had and found that by using yellow the end result was just to bright. We decided to go with a mixture between the yellow and the white as it was a good compromise to get the result that we wanted.