Buying your first home is a huge milestone and working out the interior of it is a joyous activity. However, choosing all the colors, textures, and patterns for the interior can be a daunting task. Understanding how colors make us feel through color psychology will empower you to make better design choices.
Think about it: how do you want a certain space to make you or your guests feel? Do you want it to encourage calming feelings or energize you? Read on to learn how to express yourself while creating harmonious and balanced living spaces.
How Colors Make Us Feel
To understand the role of interior architecture vs interior design, know that interior designers focus on giving an already constructed space an identity. In contrast, interior architects design the construction of that interior space. However, they both use color psychology in their respective lines of work.
Let’s discuss the feelings different colors evoke in people and how we can use these colors to communicate and enhance our environment. Here are some colors and their meanings to help you choose different colors for different spaces:
- Red means love
- Yellow means joy
- Green means contentment
- Blue means relief
- Purple means pleasure
- Black means sadness
- Gray means melancholy
How To Use Colors
Here are some basic color theory terms and their effects on color psychology to empower you to use different colors like a pro.
1. Color Temperature
The temperature of a color is how cool or warm we perceive that color makes us feel. For example, warmer colors include red, yellow, and gold, and cooler colors are blue, purple, or gray. As a rule of thumb, if the color is closer to red, it’s warm, and the closer it is to blue, it’s cool.
Warmer colors evoke passionate, stimulating, or energetic feelings, while cooler colors are calming and relaxing. It may be because our eyes are instantly attracted to warmer colors while cooler colors remain more in the background.
Cooler colors are better if you want a relaxed, easy breezy environment. They are the best for bedrooms. Warmer colors are great for promoting joy and excitement, so they are perfect for communal spaces like living rooms and dining rooms. There are no hard and fast rules for this, so you can use reds in the bedroom or gray in the living room, too.
2. Color Value
The value of a color is how light or dark that color is. The darker or closer to black a color is, the more value it has, and the brighter and lighter it is or closer to white, the lower its color value is. When a color has more value, it’s more powerful and feels expensive.
In comparison, a color with a lower value is less in your face and provides a subtle touch. You can use the same color with a high value for a bold design or a low value for a more subdued design.
3. Color Intensity
Color intensity or saturation is basically how faded or vivid a color is. Faded colors convey that something is far away and luxurious, while vivid colors make things seem closer and larger than life. Using this knowledge, you can guess that if you want your walls to seem far away and make a room bigger, you’ll choose a less intense color. Similarly, if you want to make a focus wall that grabs everyone’s attention, you’ll choose a more saturated color.