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Meaning of Color Across Culture for Presentation Design

Posted on December 11, 2013 Written by admin Leave a Comment

While I was able to find a number of excellent articles on the web explaining the meanings of colors across Western and Eastern cultures, I found most of them too long.  Here is a very simple, in some cases perhaps too simple, lookup table for using color in presentation design.  I have included primary meanings for each color and indicated the most common secondary meaning in parenthesis.

[table]

Color,Western Cultures,Eastern Cultures

Black,Formality (Death),Masculinity (Magic)
Blue,Trust (Masculinity),Trust (Femininity)
Brown,Earthy (Boring),Mourning (Earthy)
Gold,Wealth,Wealth
Green,Health (Envy),Health (Infidelity)
Grey,Wisdom,Wisdom
Orange,Attention (Warmth),Death
Pink,Femininity,Femininity (Happiness)
Purple,Nobility,Royalty
Red,Danger (Passion),Good Fortune
Silver,Modern,Modern
White,Purity (Simplicity),Death (Birth)
Yellow,Attention (Warmth),Nobility

[/table]

 

Here are the references I used in case you want to delve deeper:

http://openhighschoolcourses.org/mod/book/tool/print/index.php?id=10941

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2012/06/color-and-cultural-design-considerations/

http://globalpropaganda.com/articles/TranslatingColours.pdf

http://www.deborahswallow.com/2010/02/20/meaning-of-colours-across-cultures/

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/

http://www.illuminantpartners.com/2011/01/17/color/

 

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Filed Under: Design

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