Importance of colour blue
Until about 600 million years ago, seeing colours didn’t matter so much to Earth’s inhabitants, they did not have eyes.
Why is blue an important colour when it comes to UI and UX design? To answer that question we need to go back to the basics.
Let’s talk science
Despite the fact that blue is everyone’s favourite colour, it is extremely rare to come across it in nature. Think about it, when was the last time you saw a blue dog? Most animals prefer a shade of brown or red for their coat or skin. Even when animals utilise coloration to stand out instead of for camouflage, the colour blue is rarely seen.
Blue is one of the rarest of colours in nature. Even the few animals and plants that appear blue don’t actually contain the colour. These vibrant blue organisms have developed some unique features that use the physics of light.
The rare blue hues that do exist are the result of physical phenomena, not pigmentation.
And out of the few animals that have blue skin/feathers/scales, even fewer are ‘true’ blues. In fact, as you’ll see, many of these animals possess intricate surfaces that make them seem blue, but actually contain no blue pigmentation at al.
Let’s talk nature
True blue or not, the colour blue is nevertheless a rare natural occurrence.
Part of the reason is that there isn’t really a true blue colour or pigment in nature and both plants and animals have to perform tricks of the light to appear blue.
Colours play a huge role in nature, animals and plants use colours to attract mates, to scare off predators, to distinguish between individuals of a species. By making an individual stand out, a rare colour should confer an evolutionary advantage. Therefore there must be other factors in play, preventing the proliferation of blue.
Red means danger blue demands attention :
The primary reason why the colour red is used for danger signals is that red light is scattered the least by air molecules. The effect of scattering is inversely related to the fourth power of the wavelength of a colour. Therefore blue which has the least wavelength of all the visible radiations is scattered the most and red which has the highest wavelength of all the colours we can see is scattered the least. So red light is able to travel the longest distance through fog, rain, and the alike.Also, red is a colour we inherently perceive as one that is associated with danger. I guess it has been genetically programmed as hot objects are red in colour and also red is the colour of blood.
For animals, eye-popping blue colours, in anything from butterflies to frogs to parrots, is useful for getting attention attracting a mate (like the dance of the courting birds of paradise)
Let’s talk history
Go back far enough into art history and you will find that the colour blue as we know it today, simply did not exist. The ancient Greeks didn’t seem to have a word for it, combining it instead with what we would think of as several different colours, such as red and purple. Homer himself typically described the sea as ‘wine-dark’ rather than calling it blue.
The earliest forms of blue pigment were extracted from the semi-precious limestone rock mixture ‘lapis lazuli’
Due to its value, the colour blue was used to depict important people in Renaissance and pre-Renaissance eras. The Virgin Mary is most commonly depicted wearing blue as a mark of respect and to make her stand out.
Today, psychologists claim that blue is hardwired into the human psyche as one of the most important colour.
When it comes down to simple biology we are programmed to interpret the things we see through the lens of evolution.
The evolutionary processes have sculpted not merely the body, but also the brain, the psychological mechanisms it houses, and the behaviour it produces.
Many of those mechanisms are best conceptualised as psychological adaptations designed to solve problems that historically contributed to survival and reproduction, broadly conceived, psychological adaptations, along with byproducts of those adaptations, are activated in modern environments that differ in some important ways from ancestral environments.
Let’s talk design
From what we learned above the conclusion is that if you decide you want to draw positive attention to a button or piece of information , the best colour to use is blue.
The importance of the message plays a huge part in determining the design of the element we want to highlight. In an increasingly fast paced society, the concept of reading long text becomes less and less appealing. As a result, one wants to ensure that the call to action button is as specific as possible, and gets the message across in the shortest amount of time. That can be fixed by drawing the attention using the right colour that sends a fast message: I’m important !
We know blue brings about more clicks, but what kind of blue should UI designers be using, exactly? A few years ago, Gmail users were split tested with 40 different link colours along the blue-green scale: the bluer the links the more clicks they got, whereas links towards the green end of the spectrum discouraged clicks.
