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Using Colors while designing your online course

Color is both a strong trigger and a simple way to bring a course together. Because different colors convey different feelings, you can easily sway the learner into a particular mood about the training. Keep in mind that color differentiation should be a secondary visual representation that helps to emphasize the visuals and message being presented since some members of your audience may be color blind. Lets look at some common meanings behind colors:

Red

If you want to draw attention to a key concept in your eLearning content, use red. The eye is naturally drawn to red first. Red is the color of energyassociated with movement and excitement.

Blue

If your online training program includes physical tasks, consider using blue as the dominant color in your scheme. Some studies have shown that weight lifters can lift more weight in a blue gym and that blue surroundings lead to better performance in most sports. Steer away from blue text, however, because most learners will associate anything blue (and underlined) with a hyperlink.

Green

Green is commonly associated with finance and safety, so its a good color to use for courses on those topics. On the other hand, to avoid looking like every other safety training course out there, you might want to skip the green. Avoid color combinations of green and red which draw out feelings of Christmas.

Yellow

If youre trying to boost office morale or get employees excited about eLearning, try some yellow. A person surrounded by yellow feels optimistic because the color stimulates serotonin (the feel-good chemical) in the brain.

Orange

Trying to encourage social learning at your workplace? Orange invokes feelings of sociability, enjoyable connection, and happiness. It has an emotionally strong presence and promotes extroverted behavior, so this would be a great color to use for a social network or LMS.

Purple

Purple stimulates the problem solving areas in our brain, and it promotes creativity, intuition, and artistic ability. This would be a good color to use for soft skills courses. Purple also can elicit the feeling of wealth and power. It is associated with royalty since purple fabric dye was once a high end product only available to those with money. Use purple to stimulate sales and finance comprehension.