Let’s start with a stigma: Football fans are aggressive. So when Amsterdam built its new stadium, authorities decided to design its seats in rainbow colours. According to psychologists, a colourful environment would reduce hooliganism.
However, this decision caused widespread frustration among fans. The local club, Ajax, wears a red and white jersey.
Red is often associated with aggression. Numerous football clubs adopted it as their primary colour.
A rainbow-coloured stadium is not desired. Not even in Amsterdam, one of the gay capitals of the world.
Twenty years later, when the stadium seats needed replacement, the club announced plans for green seats.
I happened to be in the stadium when the fans got hold of this news. They were outraged!
“Green is not the colour of Ajax! It’s the colour of FC Groningen. Who on earth decided on the green seats?”
Obviously, Ajax wasn’t considering the colour green. They just wanted to express that the new seats were manufactured using sustainable materials.
Green in football fans’ vocabulary refers to clubs with green shirts. Not to environmentalism.
Rainbows calm people down, red jerseys signify aggression, green articulates sustainability.
Well, we might think.
This football anecdote shows how colour can be used in a wide variety of contexts. Colours are not only about hue and saturation but also about meaning. Each colour can have a different essence across the globe.
In this article, I will investigate how colour plays a role in our lives and digital product design. I will provide seven examples that show how colours are interpreted differently across cultures.
Our brain — Important objects have warm colours
First, we need to discuss human similarities. Despite our cultural differences, we are obviously all people, with a comparable neurological system.
We are designed to endure in the wild, and our eyesight is optimised for our survival needs.
When we lived in nature, we needed to identify threats and opportunities immediately. We hunted for food to feed ourselves and our children.
It’s not a coincidence that essential objects are often warm-coloured. Ripe fruits, burning fires, or insects, are frequently red, orange, or yellow.
Plants, grass, water, and the sky are cold colours: green and blue.
Our retina has sensors (cones) that help us see these colours. We use three cone types: one for blue (short wavelengths), one for green (medium), and one for red (long).
Our eyes have more cones that detect red than blue or green. We are designed to catch warm colours better. Why do you think the notification bubbles on our phones are shown in red?
Biology scientists at MIT studied the vocabulary of colour of various peoples. They wanted to understand if cultures have a similar way of describing colours.
They mainly investigated the differences between three groups: the hunter-gatherer Tsimane people of the Amazon, Spanish-speaking people in Bolivia, and students in Boston.
The researchers concluded:
Across languages … warm colors are communicated more efficiently than cool colors. This cross-linguistic pattern reflects the color statistics of the world: Objects (what we talk about) are typically warm-colored, and backgrounds are cool-colored.
So, in each culture, we are more effective in communicating warm tints. This is universal across the globe.
But what about our differences?
1. Is red positive or negative?
Whether it’s a forest fire, ripe apples, strawberries, or cherries, or a super-toxic snake or frog, seeing red is essential to our survival.
Red is the warmest colour. It might also be the most polarising colour.
For a Westerner, the meaning of red can be associated with something negative. A downward trend or a stop sign.
If the stock market goes down, red is shown. If it goes up, it is green.
However, in China, red is the colour of opportunity. Upward trends or elevators that move upwards, are shown in red.
Left: Yahoo, green is positive — Right: Shanghai Stock Exchange, green is negative
A simple look at some financial websites can confirm this colour preference. American website Yahoo shows positive numbers in green, whereas the Shanghai Stock Exchange uses red for upward trends.
An article in the Journal of Behavioural Decision Making studied this phenomenon more deeply.
The researchers looked not only at financial markets but also at other aspects of society.
Mainland China television programs customarily use red up arrows to describe increasing numbers and green down arrows to describe decreasing numbers. Hong Kong television programs, however, use the opposite.
During the study, participants were shown a business proposal presentation.
Mainland Chinese predicted more consumption growth when information was presented in red than in green. In contrast, Hong Kong Chinese predicted the opposite.
The difference between China and Hong Kong can be explained by the influence of the English in Hong Kong, which has been much more Westernised than China.
In the West, red is often used as an alert. You are caught red-handed, you see red, your bank balance is in the red, and you are limited by red tape. A job candidate shows red flags and uses red herrings.
Contrarily, red can also convey sensuality and romance. Hearts are red, and the sex industry and nightclubs use red, too. We (or at least some) walk on red carpets.
In Asia, red is associated with good luck, prosperity, and happiness. It is often used in traditional celebrations and festivals, such as Chinese New Year and weddings.
The main CTAs in China are usually red (left jd.com — right vmall.com Google Translated)
2. Some colours were more expensive than others
A great way to explain how specific colours found their meaning is to explore how paint used to be created.
Purple paint was historically expensive to produce. This gave it its meaning of high value.
In ancient Greece, purple was the colour of the gods. In the Bible, heaven is decorated in purple and gold. It was the colour of officials in the Roman Empire, and the Catholic cardinals wore purple robes.
The phrase “born to the purple” comes from the Byzantine Empire. It refers to royal children born in the palace’s purple room. The infants were draped in purple fabric. These days, we use “Born to the purple” to describe someone born into a life of privilege.
In China, yellow is also an exclusive colour due to its scarcity. The colour of the Emperor of China’s robe was saffron yellow.
Today we can artificially make dye and paint that give purple colour and “imperial yellow” at relatively low costs. In ancient times, however, 1200 purple shells were needed to produce 1.4 grams of real purple and 15,000 stigmas from saffron crocus were needed to produce 0.5 kilograms of saffron yellow.
Source
So, the harder it was to obtain shells of a specific colour, the more exclusive this colour was considered.
Nihao Jewelry uses purple to communicate exclusivity
3. What is the colour of spirituality?
In the West, people associate meditation with a state of nature. Peace and tranquillity can be found in the light blue sky or in water. The association of light blue with serenity translates into app design.
When we consider the vast number of Western meditation, yoga, and mindfulness apps, we might conclude that blue is the colour of spirituality.
Meditation apps are usually blue coloured
However, the popular app Headspace uses orange for its branding. This is not unexplainable.
An article from the University of the West of Scotland touches upon this.
In Asia orange is a positive, spiritually enlightened, and life-affirming colour
Simply looking at the temples in Asia clearly shows how orange and spirituality are linked.
The Scottish scientists further mention something interesting.
The Shona language in Zimbabwe and the Boas language in Liberia have no words which distinguish red from orange. Therefore, people fail to perceive different colours because of language limitations.
This shows that our understanding of colour (and the world in general) is related to our vocabulary. Without a word for something, we assign it a different meaning in our mental model.
3. How much colour is too much?
The same Scottish article continues to find something revealing when the linguistics of colour are further investigated.
Those who live in climates with a lot of sunlight prefer warm bright colours; while those from climates with less sunlight prefer cooler, less saturated colours. — Eskimos use 17 words for white as applied to different snow conditions.
I am a resident of both Nothern European cities and a Mediterranean one. The differences between the two geographical opposites in architecture and fashion are easily visible. In the French city of Nice, houses are made of many colours, and the streets are vibrant. In Amsterdam, all houses are built with similar bricks.
Left Amsterdam, right Willemstad — Photo by Nastya Dulhiier and Ramon Kagie on Unsplash
A simple comparison between the Dutch city of Amsterdam and the former Dutch colony of Curaçao shows that the architecture is similar. Still, the buildings in Willemstad are much more colourful.
When we analyse governmental websites, we can demonstrate the differences in colour preferences.
Top: Cameroon, Tanzania, Mozambique, Ivory Coast — Bottom: Norway, Poland, Germany, Estonia
In the image above, the top four screenshots are homepages of African countries’ governments. All websites use a broad spectrum of colours, reflecting the colourful nature of African life.
This translates to their preference for aesthetics in fashion and digital design. In Africa, people wear much more colourful clothes.
The bottom four websites are from European countries. They all chose a minimal design in blue, a neutral colour.
The European and North American aesthetic is much more minimalistic than the African one.
4. Can colour choices increase product quality?
Jean-Charles Chebat and Maureen Morrin published some bizarre findings in the Journal of Business Research.
The researchers explored how consumers experienced shopping mall decoration.
The study found that colour did not influence pleasure and arousal levels. However, the decoration impacted how visitors sensed the mall environment. This experience then led to a different perception of the product quality.
Notably, there were cultural differences. French Canadians responded more to the warm-coloured decoration, and Anglo-Canadians preferred a cool environment.
The study concludes:
French Canadians had higher perceptions of product quality when the mall exhibited a warm colour décor. In contrast, Anglo-Canadians had higher perceptions of product quality when the mall exhibited a cool color décor.¨
5. How can we make our brand more reliable?
So, English-speaking Canadians found the products were of higher quality when the mall was decorated in cool colours. Blue is the most apparent cool colour, and it is indeed associated with quality and reliability.
Many banks use blue in their branding, and numerous social media platforms choose blue because data privacy is important to them. Or well, they want you to believe this. These apps include Signal, Discord, and Telegram. LinkedIn, Skype, and Zoom also present themselves as professional and reliable.
Virtual Private Networks and other digital security apps often opt for a blue-ish branding, too.
VPN apps often have a blue branding
The term ‘blue-blooded’ is used to describe the aristocracy in all languages. I’m unsure how much monarchy really relates to reliability, but it certainly conveys nobility.
Playing the blues and feeling blue means being sad and nostalgic, but the word doesn’t have a similar meaning in other languages than in English.
“blau sein” (to be blue) means being drunk in German. Lithuanians use “žydras”, and Russians use “голубой” (light blue) to describe homosexuals in an offensive way, although god knows if the Kremlin is trying to erase this word altogether at the moment.
In the West, the term blue-collar worker describes someone who performs manual labour, typically in manufacturing, construction, and maintenance.
6. Black and white
White collar workers, and let’s squeeze white collar criminals into the terminology too, are those who perform their work or crimes behind a desk. Perhaps they whitewash their money.
White can be used to describe something pure—think about white tablecloths in restaurants. In China, white is the colour of mourning.
White can be the colour of peace (doves), and we have white flags when we surrender.
If we trust something, we can add this to a whitelist. However, if we find something toxic, we will blacklist this. We speak about a black page in history. Outcasts are black sheep. Pirates have a black flag.
This shows that our language has a bias towards associating white things with positive and black with negative.
The colour black is mainly associated with fear for people of all ages; police officers in black uniforms are perceived more negatively than those in blue uniforms, and sports teams in black jerseys are seen as meaner.
Villains after often black whilst the hero is frequently light — Photo by Daniel K Cheung on Unsplash
7. Do politics and religion have a colour?
In Europe, the colour red is usually associated with the Labour Party, often combined with the image of a rose. Red can also be associated with communism or “the People’s Party.”
Green is a logical colour for the parties that emphasise environmentalism. Green is the colour of nature. We might live a green lifestyle and have green fingers in the UK and the Netherlands, green hands in Germany, or a green thumb in Italy.
Green should be used cautiously in Muslim countries. For Muslims, green can be sacred. A look at the app store directly shows why. When we look for Islamic prayer apps, most are branded green.
Muslim apps are often green
The obvious conclusion
We are naturally designed to notice red objects quickly. Does this mean a threat or an opportunity? It depends.
Should we use warm or cool colours in a shop to increase the perception of the product’s quality? It depends.
What colour do you associate with spirituality? Orange or blue? It depends.
Purple and yellow became signs of wealth due to their difficulty in production.
Green is related to Islam or environmentalism and red to socialism.
Colours are more than just aesthetics. The way we look at colour is influenced by our climate. It’s even affected by how scarce certain colours of shells were.
When you design your brands or UIs, you can not just simply pick random colours that look nice. You can not assume that a green “add to shopping cart” button leads to more sales. You can not take for granted that red error messages are perceived as an encouragement to improve form inputs.
My articles often reach the same conclusion, so I sometimes feel like a broken record. But if you want to serve the global market, or a market outside of your own bubble, you really need to understand the people you want to reach.
You need to test your product with its specific target audience. I would even argue that you should assemble a genuinely multicultural design team to deliver a high-quality multicultural product.
Simply testing your app with a seemingly diverse set of users in your local area is still not diverse. It’s just diverse in your own bubble.
I must admit that this article took a lot of my grey matter. The world has many cultural subtilities, but it’s not easy to identify the differences.
Each continent, country, and culture has its unique way of using colour. This usually comes from its history, climate, and the exclusivity of shells, paint, and other objects.
I come from a cold climate and am sometimes green with envy when I look at warmer cultures. They tend to be much more colourful, but hey, the grass is always greener on the other side.
I know this article contains just a tiny portion of examples of cultural colour. It’s impossible to cover all the subtilities of cultural colour differences in a short text. I nevertheless invite you to share your cultural colour experiences in the comments! I would love to write a second article on this topic.
How the meaning of colour varies per culture was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
