I’ve been reading ‘Signage and Wayfinding Design’ by Chris Calori. Here’s a bit of what she wrote on COLOR:
Color Selection Considerations
Color can play a role in whether signs contrast or harmonize with the sign environment. For those projects where navigation decisions must be quickly and easily made, such as transportation facilities, a goal may be to make the signs stand out from their surrounding environment so that they can be easily distinguished, read, and acted upon. In such cases, color can be one of the most obvious factors to set the sign program apart from its surrounding environment. For other projects, a goal may be to make the sign program blend in more closely with its setting, which can be achieved through the use of sign colors that harmonize with the environmental setting. In general, depending on the overall color palette of a given sign environment, bright, saturated colors can enliven and stand out from the environment, and neutral, more subtle colors can blend with or recede from the environment.
Color can also play roles in augmenting the meaning of sign messages and in distinguishing sign messages from one another. Obvious ways color can augment the meaning of a message is when the color red is used for warning or emergency messages, and yellow is used for attention-getting messages. Color can be used for either the message graphics themselves (the figure) or the message background (the ground). Sometimes color is used in other graphic elements such as squares, bars, or circles to augment or distinguish sign messages.
Color Coding
The use of color to communicate the meaning in sign graphics leads to the topic of color coding, which will be discussed briefly here. Color-coding links to a given message with a given color to reinforce the message and to distinguish it from other messages. For color-coding to be effective in signage, a message and color must be linked, because color by itself is too ambiguous to communicate a specific message clearly.
One of the few instances where color alone communicates a clear message is with traffic signals, but that’s because the driving population worldwide has been trained over time to stop on red and go on green. Yet even this clear-cut response doesn’t translate to uses of red and green in signage. For example, in many countries, green is used for exit sign graphics because of its association with the concept of go, as in “Go out.” Red is used for exit sign graphics because of its association with danger, warning, and emergency, regardless of it seeming illogic that red is also associated with the concept of stop, as in “Do not proceed through this exit.” There are two points here: first, the meanings associated with colours are learned and, second, that those meanings vary with geographical location and culture.
