Learn the psychology of color for digital products and campaigns.
LIVE online class over 9-weeks

In just 5 weeks, you'll learn how to use color psychology for human-centered websites, apps, and digital campaigns.
 
This class will teach you how to translate color psychology into digital products through a blend of lessons in psychology and neuroscience focused on interactive design challenges.

You'll learn the physics and biology of color perception before turning to behavioral science and emotional design. Learn, too, how to use color psychology for branding, user health, accessibility, controlling user attention, fostering instant comprehension, evoking emotions, and shaping behavior.  

This course helps you develop new skills in using color for product design, digital strategy, and many other applications. It also enables you to avoid nonsense claims about color and emotion by introducing you to the latest breed of credible color psychology science.

Build better technology with color psychology

This class teaches you how to build better technology by harnessing the psychology and neuroscience of color.

You’ll learn the latest science and deepen your understanding of color, what it is and how it impacts your users’ perceptions, emotions, and behavior.

The class starts with an overview of the physics and biology of color perception, then turns to color psychology, behavioral science, and emotional design.

We’ll focus on hands-on applications in branding, user health, accessibility, controlling user attention, fostering instant comprehension, evoking emotions, and shaping behavior.

You’ll learn how color operates in technology, covering color spaces, tech standards, and more. All materials are compatible with current and next-gen W3C CSS color standards. This class is excellent for beginners, experts, and alumni from our other courses.

Training schedule

You’ll enjoy around 2 LIVE classes per week, over 5 weeks.

Each class lasts 1 hour, with tutorial time afterward, for individual feedback and open discussions.

Though we officially schedule 30 minutes for tutorials, Dr. Cugelman typically sticks around as long as students wish–within reason.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

1. Light, color & vision

This lesson starts with a conceptual review of light, color, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Next, we’ll discuss the human eye, color perception, visual impairments, and how the brain processes color. Finally, you’ll learn how our biology, culture, and language bias the colors we notice and those we ignore.

2. Color systems & technology

This lesson explains how different color systems work then covers technology-based color systems. We show you why sRGB sucks and why the W3C proposes CIELAB-based CSS standards. We’ll also cover technical color standards, metrics, and other essentials. You’ll learn how color systems in tech impact aesthetics, accessibility, and the intuitiveness of colors. Finally, we’ll show you the behavioral color system and share various design resources.

3. Behavioral design & color psychology

We’ll set the goals for your color palette by exploring all the demands placed on color systems. Then we’ll take a behavioral science approach. Next, you’ll learn credible principles for determining which colors are best suited for evoking specific emotions, cognitive judgments, and feelings. Historically, this has been a low credibility area of science. However, the latest neuroscience, psychology, and AI research will transform your understanding.

4. Light cycles & circadian health

This lesson explains how seasonal and daily cycles of light shape users’ color preferences, emotions, and physical health. You’ll gain a new perspective on color temperature and the ways colors fluctuate all around us. We cover circadian rhythms and strategies for building technologies that are more engaging, less disruptive, and better at promoting user health. We cover other visual health topics then go over techniques for building healthier and more engaging technologies.

5. Controlling attention

When users don’t notice important content, problems happen. Our tech becomes hard to navigate, motivating messages don’t motivate, and users make mistakes. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to control the salience of every visual component so users notice the parts that matter. You’ll then learn to translate these strategies into a visual hierarchy that keeps your system usable, motivating, and enjoyable. What’s better, your tech will feel super intuitive.

6. Instant comprehension

When designers misapply color, users feel confused, lost, and sometimes so frustrated that they leave. Miscolored charts can cause users to misjudge what numbers mean. Badly colored messages can lead users to make harmful mistakes or miss opportunities they’ll regret. This lesson covers how people ascribe meaning to color, multi-sensory perception, perceptual uniformity, and symbolic understanding. We’ll do over applications for UI and data visualization.

7. Motivating emotions

Nothing happens in technology till users feel something. But what colors evoke the right emotions? This lesson covers neuroaesthetics, how we form emotional associations with color, and techniques for motivating and reinforcing user behavior. We cover Dr. Cugelman’s motivational quadrant system and show you how to use the Color Psychology Map in emotional design. We also cover research techniques for uncovering emotion-color associations.

8. Conscious behavior

There are times when we want our users to form routine habits with our interfaces. But at other times, we need them to stop, think, and make a conscious decision. In this lesson, we go over design strategies for different levels of consciousness, focusing on forming color-behavior associations that foster unconscious, habitual behavior. We also cover techniques for stopping the flow and forcing users to stop and pay attention.

9. Trustworthy brands

There are so many problems associated with color and branding. When zealots push brand colors too aggressively, this can destroy functional UI, damage products, and corrode user trust. When colors don’t foster instant familiarity, we miss an opportunity to boost their confidence and warm them up. In this lesson, we cover the psychology of branding and delve into color strategies for building effective branding colors.

Training Materials

Many of our design resources are already online.

However, you’ll get access to our latest resources and a few bonuses we haven’t published.

✓ Interactive design tools

✓ Color research system

✓ Design guides

✓ Behavioral color tools

This is a LIVE online class, one where we invite you to keep your mic and camera on so we can interact as if we were in a physical classroom.

To learn more about our teaching approach, visit our online learning page.
Format:


LIVE class details:

  •  Schedule: 2-30 Nov 2022
  •  Timing: Mondays & Wednesdays (13:00-14:30 EST)
  •  Instructor: Brian Cugelman, PhD