

Red = Happy? Orange = Creative? Blue = Fun? ...Color Associations Revisited - dariusmonsef
http://www.colourlovers.com/business/blog/2010/10/26/color-of-the-year-2010-by-the-people

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treeface
While interesting, these conclusions require much more in-depth analysis over
multiple years to be of much real value.

Colourlovers.com is pushing this as a way of finding out what color clothes
people are going to buy, but do the results of this survey correspond with the
colors people choose in their clothing? Do these colors vary significantly
from year to year? What are the mean values and standard deviations for
various popular hues across international borders? Sure, the US is red, Canada
is yellow, and Australia is orange, but by how much?

You could do a lot of interesting things with this data...does anyone know if
they've released it?

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dariusmonsef
We are open to sharing the data.

I wasn't saying that the data directly is useful for people looking to plan
fashion lines a year from now... I was simply saying that the old model of
forecasting far off becomes harder to do when mass customization allows for
people to have more options.

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treeface
Cool! That's very generous of you.

I didn't mean to say that that's exactly what you implied, I simply meant to
suggest that the postulation might have a flaw, even if it is an interesting
one. Either way, I'm glad to have found your site! As someone who has
difficulty with color, I'll be checking it out for sure.

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jcfrei
In terms of color, I would say myspace created the association blue == social
(eg.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20050104004746/http://myspace.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050104004746/http://myspace.com/)
). Thus I would even argue that facebook wouldnt have become the stellar
success it is today, if its main theme was, for example, green.

From a programmers perspective choosing the right colors for your product
might seem like a mundane task. but I think it is a key factor when it comes
to popularity - just because the human perception relies so much on colors.
Just ask yourself; would you buy a red car? What would happen if facebook
changed the “facebook blue” from #3B5998 to #3B59CC?

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dariusmonsef
Facebook is blue not so much because of emulating Myspace... but because
Zuckerberg is Red/Green colorblind... so that was the obvious choice for him.

And Blue has been a strong color online and in the business world for a long
time... Think IMB "Big Blue." Again, there are social reasons that could
affect this... but there is also the fact that tech has mostly been a male
dominated space and a large number of males are red/green colorblind.

And the best example of how funny the social connections are with color. Can
you imagine driving a pink car? Wearing a pink suit? Sounds girly right? You'd
never do that.

But it wasn't that long ago that the gender association of those colors
switched. It was an old advertisement for from the 30s or so, that showed that
pink was the great new color for little girls. To that point pink was for boys
and blue for girls. (Because Red is a strong aggressive color and blue is a
soft mellow one... and pink is just a lighter version of red.)

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sosuke
Where are the negative color associations? What color was used for fear in
2010 etc.

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dariusmonsef
We didn't specifically exclude negative words... But I'm sure we could dig in
and look for specific negative words like Anger, Fear, Hate, etc. and see what
colors are associated with those words...

Good idea for a larger color association specific post.

