David Ford

Mr. White
Period 5
6 October 2016
The Influence of Color Theory and Other Psychological Concepts on Web Design
Often times we underestimate the impact that our psychology has on our ability to retain
information, navigate a website, or drives our aesthetic preferences. However, according to
color theory, color can influence not only our design choices, but also our mood and memory
retention. Text and background that have contrasting colors make reading webpages easier,
especially for students that are in a hurry to find the information.
An article written by Richard H. Hall and Patrick Hanna provided me with the information
that colors with greater contrast ratio generally leads to greater readability and that color
combination does not significantly impact learning retention. This means that when designing a
website, one should avoid worrying about specific combinations of colors and focus on colors
with a greater contrast ratio in order to reduce difficulty in reading the site, as well as reducing
any potential eye strain that colors with less contrast ratio might inflict upon the viewer (Hall and
Hanna 2014).
A website created by the University of Washington teaches much about relevant
information for website building and design according to current psychological theories. This
website contains information on designing and planning webpages, creating web pages with
HTML, formatting web pages with style sheets, web graphics, as well as overall site
development and design. All of this useful information can be implemented into building a
website for students to access information as all of these concepts would allow a person with an
understanding of them to create a more aesthetically pleasing, easily navigated web page that
will enhance the viewers learning experience (University of Washington 2008).

One site, created by Ivana Mcconnell, goes into even more detail of the psychology
behind a successful web design. It explores concepts such as pattern recognition in our brains,
which can be used as shortcuts when designing web pages. This can save time on building a
layered web site and allow the viewer to be able to naturally navigate through a page with ease.
This site also explores concepts like top versus down website approach and designing for
recognition and success. One could take advantage of such a site in order to better build one of
their own (Mcconnell 2015) .
Another web site one could use to learn more about web design and color theory is a
website created by the University of New Hampshire. This website goes into detail about which
colors signify what psychologically, as well as which colors one should use for which
demographics and finally it goes into detail about the process of applying the psychology of
colors to web design. Anyone attempting to build a website could benefit from this information
greatly. One could learn how to insert a warm feeling to a web page, or how to make a web
page appear more dark and serious (Sullivan 2015).
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/01449290410001669932?
scroll=top&needAccess=true
Hall, R. H., & Hanna, P. (2004). The impact of web page text-background colour combinations
on readability, retention, aesthetics and behavioural intention. Behaviour & Information
Technology,23(3), 183195. doi:10.1080/01449290410001669932
http://www.washington.edu/accessit/webdesign/student/unit1/module2/lesson1.htm
University of Washington. (2005). Color theory in web design. Retrieved October 3, 2016, from
Web Design and Development

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/09/30/the-psychology-behind-successful-web-design/#gref
McConnell, I. (2015, September 30). The psychology behind successful web design. Retrieved
October 3, 2016, from
http://itcourses.cs.unh.edu/502/posted_tutorials/fall15-tut/tmh64/index.html
Sullivan, T. (2016, August 20). IT502 - intermediate web design - psychology of color theory Tim Sullivan. Retrieved October 3, 2016, from Psychology of Color Theory,