Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Angela Waner on November 1, 2010 at 10:14am

I have not done any A/B testing, but I find the subject very interesting.

Colors are metadata. They carry cultural messages.

Colors are physical. They can make the text easier to read or cause eye strain.

But I think that we (as a world) are developing a common "color" language. It seems like many websites use blue to communication "we can be trusted".

http://www.viadeo.com/fr/connexion is a popular "business" social network site for French speakers. They use blue, yellow, green and orange. http://www.linkedin.com (popular with English speakers for work related social networking) uses blue and orange.

The most popular social media website in China, http://renren.com/, uses blue and green. http://www.kaixin001.com/ (second most popular in China) does use red, but they don't overload the website with this color.

I think the most important color is white. The amount of white space around text and images helps me quickly read/understand. And the font has to be easy to read.

Permalink Reply by Mike on November 2, 2010 at 1:42am

Have not done any A/B testing but this was a consideration when I was working in international marketing for education. You also need to be careful to avoid bad luck or colours which mean a particular thing to a country - for example one x communist country did not like red.