The right colors help convey your personality while creating an emotional connection with your audience and gather the right people around you. In contrast, the wrong colors can mislead people about who you are and deter the ones that you would like to attract.
In the book Designing for Emotion, Aarron Walter, former Director of User Experience at MailChimp, encourages everyone to “harness the power of psychology to create positive, long-lasting memories of your website in your audience’s minds.” So, why not start using colors to express your unique personality and begin to shape your personal brand?
Colors Are an Expression of Your Personality
In The Attraction Paradigm study, the psychologist Donn Byrne showed the impact of similarity on our relationships and concluded that “the greater the similarity between two persons, the greater the attraction between them.”
Through our personality, we express a whole range of emotions and people who resonate tend to stick close to us while the rest stay away. Our personality resides everywhere, and plays a major role in our social circles, both offline and online — through our website or other media platforms.
On our personal blogs, we all start to express those emotions mainly through our writing style. The tone of voice we use conveys who we are and how we feel when we draft a piece of content — it could be the joy of recalling a childhood memory or the fear that struck us in a life-threatening situation.
Things like the rich golden yellow of the yolk from a broken egg, or the color of tea brimming in a teacup, are not merely colors, rather they are perceived as so.
Kenya Hara, White
Through our language, we’ve all learned to associate colors with words, and therefore link emotions with those words. Even if each color is perceived slightly differently from person to person depending on culture or gender (think pink or blue?), a word like yellow could induce the feeling of happiness, while red could surface a memory of a dangerous situation.
Benefits of Expressing Your Personality Through Colors
Once we identify a new color, our brain instantly produces an emotional response that triggers a series of thoughts and memories. Our brains are hard-wired to
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
Colors give your readers a special feeling, and they can be enough to make a design feel distinctive and not go unnoticed. Let’s see some of the perks that you get when using (the right) colors in your blog’s design:
1. Distinguish you from your competitors
If you want to stand out from the crowd, colors could help you cut through the noise. Using black text on a white background is easy, and dull, and ordinary, and default. Pick your favorite colors and use them across your blog to express your personality traits, to show that you’re unique and different from others, that you have something meaningful to say.
Colors can be more than enough to make your website feel different and encourage your audience to remember you.
Tip: Make a statement and show the primary qualities of your personality by using one or two more saturated, vibrant colors.
2. Establish an emotional connection with your audience
We like to think that we’re rational human beings but much of our decision-making is influenced by emotions. As a consequence, we tend to pay little attention to boring things. An experience deprived of feelings, one that doesn’t strike a chord with us, will quickly fade away from memory.
Rather than choosing an ordinary (and boring) color scheme that is likely to be forgotten once you leave the website, pay attention to details and put in the effort to create one that is consistently in tune with your personality. Your readers will remember that emotional experience, and they will add your brand to their long-term memory and grow in loyalty.
Tip: While trying to create a bold palette, adding loads of colors isn’t always the best solution. If you feel adventurous though, try to slightly mute each one or allow for enough whitespace to have them breathe.
3. Grow a consistent audience around your personality
Most of us tend to be attracted to people who are similar to ourselves (even if Disney likes to think that opposites attract – it’s just a myth). That is why we strive to be part of communities that hold the same views and values.
Having a blog with a distinct personality will help you retain those you want to reach and attract, and build an audience you can truly relate with.
Start factoring your personality into the design, use colors that reflect who you are, and you will be better suited to stir up that all-important emotional response in people like you. This way you can captivate and inspire readers that will stick around longer, promote your brand whenever they can, and become one of your most powerful marketing channels.
Tip: A monochromatic color palette centered around a single accent color is easier to get right and it can help associate your brand with a specific, memorable color.
Be Yourself and You Will Be Remarkable
Seth Godin wrote that “if you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you.” When expressing your personality through colors, expect that not everyone will like the results — and that’s fine! If you want your design to please everyone, you will end up pleasing no one. If some people hate it that’s a good signal you are engaging with your audience on an emotional level — keep going that way!
Interested in learning more? Check out How to choose the right colors when creating a website?
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