Design Guide: Color

Color is a part of our everyday lives. People’s attitudes, manners, and emotions are affected both emotionally and psychologically by the use of color. Culturally, color can also represent many different ideas and beliefs. The use of color can portray a thought or design. It consumes our interest and makes one act in response based on experiences and ways of life.

Color can bring a whole new look to an everyday room. It can instantaneously change the mood and attitude of the room. Psychologically, certain colors convey different emotions. By using the correct use of colors in your house, you can create a welcoming environment!

Here are some examples about how color influences mood:

Yellow: increases the size of the room, brightens, and increases liveliness.

White: purifies, strengthens, unifies; in combination, livens up all other colors.

Black: organizes, strengthens, encourages independence

Orange: commands; stimulates appetites, conversation, and charity.

Red: empowers, sense of urgency, dramatizes, competes, symbolizes passion.

Green: balances, health, future prosperity, refreshes, encourage emotional growth.

Purple: intelligence, royalty, spiritualizes; creates mystery and draws out intuition.

Blue: melancholy, cool, produces tranquil feelings and peaceful moods.

Pink: soothes, acquiesces; promotes affability and affection.

The color wheel can also help in the choice of home decorating
Here are a few simple rules to follow:

• Analogous colors are any three consecutive color segments on the color wheel. For example, blue, blue-violet, and violet are analogous colors. Analogous colors produce a palette that blends well and conveys a feeling of harmony.
• Complementary colors use two hues (shade) that are directly opposite. This color selection is very powerful, vibrant and provides high contrast, but it sometimes can be quite loud and hard to view over long periods of time. 
• Monochromatic colors use all the hues of one color segment. A monochromatic color scheme conveys accordance through gradual tone changes in the single-hue segment.
• Colors that are close together on the color wheel are good to use for subtle changes.
• Use warm colors to suggest warmth (e.g., red and orange are the colors of fire). Cool colors suggest coolness (e.g., blue and green are the colors of water).
• Remember that warm colors appear larger than cool colors.