"Color me creative"

People have been talking a lot about how colors influence behavior. A study published in Science Magazine today added one more entry to the list.

Red: improves performance on detail-oriented tasks
Blue: stimulates creativy

The article goes on to discuss underlying causes. Stressful colors like red might enhance effectiveness of getting things done. Blue “calm” colors are better for coming up with that brilliant idea.

Regardless of whether these type of studies are right or not: picking a color scheme for your company look and feel (and/or your PowerPoint presentation) is a far more important decision than deciding the graphics of your logo.

2 comments

Ellen Finkelstein2009-02-11 20:53:00

Glad to see someone else picked up on this. I also wrote about it at including the point, "No one is saying that you should use blue hearts for a Valentine's Day presentation. That just doesn't make sense."

Jan Schultink2009-02-11 20:59:00

Thank you Ellen for this useful link to your blog with a very detailed description of this research. For some reason, the link in your comment is not active, you can click it here to go directly to the post.