Color Palette

Rules of Color

Color can evoke emotions and influence the mindset of the learner. Green is often associated with invoking concentration and focus, blue with having a calming effect and increasing productivity, orange with a friendly, uplifting environment. While drawing on the psychology of color is one aspect of decision making, the overriding rule in color selection is to use colors that compliment the visual image that communicates the theme of the digital space.

That said, color should be aesthetically used for visual emphasis and to improve clarity of symbols used to communicate. Limiting complementary colors to one is preferable, with a second complementary color (often black or white) leveraged to increase clarity and highlight the vision and creativity communicated through the blend of image and color.

Example

The image below is used for an online undergraduate course in critical thinking and composition. Black is used to give definition and highlight the primary color blue and the aesthetic created from its interplay with white. White serves as both the main accent color as well as a color that improves readability with the small amount of negative text (larger amounts of white text on black would decrease readability and so should be avoided in these cases).

The color blue is also often associated with a calming effect, which can be a psychologically effective color choice to improve learning in a course that deals with complicated, abstract concepts like a critical thinking course does. The implication is that difficulty or hard to grasp material can hightened anxiety and stress, which can impede cognitive processing. A calming color such as blue is responsive to this experience.