Greetings fellow Web Designers, Usability Experts, SEOs and Internet Marketers - you’re going to get a kick out of this!

As you’ve learned in your workaday worlds, color choice is an integral part of building web pages, whether you’re setting a mood, calling attention to a button, or sending a branding message. Both color psychology (the way humans react to certain colors) and color symbolism (cultural meanings applied to various colors) may be taken into account when you’re developing the layout of a website, or honing it for ease of use or better conversions. But our industry is far from the first to get so serious about shades and hues. In the 1940’s, Dr. Max Lüscher developed his Color Diagnostic Test that is still being used today by colleges and corporations as part of a screening process.

I’m inviting you all to take the short version of this test. Then, copy your diagnosis, and come back here to find out what it all means. If you’re comfortable with doing so, please share your diagnosis with us. I’ll be the guinea pig here, and share my test results for the sake of example and I think you’ll find this a neat, and potentially revealing, exercise. Now, Go Take The Quiz!

If you’re reading this paragraph, I hope you’ve taken the quiz and found it interesting. Now, as promised, I’ll tell you my personal results from this. I chose the colors in this order: brown, green, yellow, red, violet, black, grey, blue.

My diagnosis:

Trying to improve her position and prestige. Dissatisfied with her existing circumstances and considers some improvement essential to her self-esteem.

I was rather taken aback, on the one hand, by the accuracy of this. In point of fact, I find it kind of funny that in my very first Cre8tive Flow blog post, (in which I’m trying to improve my position and prestige) my choice of colors has got me pegged so thoroughly. Who can blame me if I feel that the exciting opportunity of contributing to my favorite forum’s blog is something to be proud of? But, being an investigative kind of woman, I wanted to find out how this diagnosis had been made, and this brought up some issues that made me question the validity of the process.

Here’s a much simplified explanation of how the test works:

According to Dr. Lüscher’s rather extensive research, these colors represent the following feelings and behaviors:

Blue

Depth of feeling, passivity, sensitivity, unification, tranquility, contentment, tenderness, and love and affection.

Green

Elasticity of will, passivity, defensiveness, autonomy, possessiveness, persistence, self-assertiveness, obstinacy, and self-esteem.

Red

Force of Will, active, offensive-aggressive, autonomy, competitiveness, desire, excitability, domination, and sexuality.

Yellow

Spontaneity, active, projective, heteronomous, expansive, aspiring, investigative, variability, expectancy, originality, and exhilaration.

Violet

A mixture of red and blue that represents ‘identification’ and is looking for realized dreams, enchantment and magical relationships.

Brown

Bodily senses and body condition.

Black

Nothingness, renunciation, ultimate surrender and relinquishment.

Grey

Colorlessness, neither dark nor light, concealment and non-involvement.

The diagnosis is reached from the order in which you choose the colors, from most favored to least. These are then read in the following way:

1st pick: This shows your basic methods, your modus operandi, for achieving your objectives.

2nd pick: This shows what your objective really is.

3rd and 4th picks: These sum up your actual state of affairs - how things really are at present in your life.

5th and 6th picks: These are characteristics you are currently rejecting in your day to day life, but you could bring them into play, at will, if required to.

7th and 8th picks: These are the characteristics you have turned most away from and, according to Lüscher, represent the very things for which you have the deepest need but are suppressing out of necessity.

My thoughts on how accurately these factors summed me up

I thought it was interesting that brown indicates bodily senses. As my first choice, if I believe in the validity of this test, this would be accurate for me in that I have several environmental illnesses and dealing with them does form a part of my daily life. My second choice, green, resonates with me in a way as I can be a very passive person when I feel overwhelmed by too many stresses, and I am highly possessive about things that are important to me. Yellow, as my actual state of affairs, is also potentially quite accurate. People who know me think of me as very original (in a nice way, I hope) and I am always one who does things on the spur of the moment… I hate making plans. I find it difficult to see myself as most of the Red qualities, and just don’t agree that my present state of affairs revolves around projecting my will on people or wishing to dominate them. I hate that kind of thing. On the other hand, here I sit, an SEO, most definitely being paid to project my will on the public and dominate Google. So, what do you know about that? Did leaving my childhood behind and renouncing my early dreams kill off my sense of enchantment in life (violet and black)? It could be, but that would require a lot of going into. The last two are confusing. I apparently desperately need to be loved, but also desperately need to conceal things and not involve myself in life. I’m afraid I’d better see a psychologist about that one!

After taking the test and reading about the methods behind it, I became suspicious that anyone could read anything into the results. I found I could both agree and disagree with each of the statements being made about me, based upon my color choices. However, the real concern for me here is that both culture and an individual’s situation in life could so pre-dispose them to associate feelings with colors that they may be basing their choices on a set of factors that aren’t being taken into account. For example, in China, red means celebration and white means death. Here in America, red is often associated with anger and white with peacefulness. How would this sway an individual’s choice? Or, even more basically, supposing you were hit by a blue car last year and your leg was broken. From this, you’ve developed a small phobia of the color blue. If this causes you to choose blue last, should you really be diagnosed as suppressing your need for affection and love? I really question that.

And then you’ve got a person like me, who has been a fine artist all my adult life and a graphic artist since my husband and I founded our web design firm. My relationship to colors is so intimate, so much a part of my daily life, that my reasons for liking one color over another may simply not be comparable to those of the average person whose last thought about colors occurred when they were 6 years old and they decided their favorite color was yellow.

This test was developed in order to diagnose psychological and physical problems, but I believe that the assumptions being made about the average person’s feelings about colors could easily lead to very wrong diagnoses. It could also cause colleges and companies to make false assumptions about their prospective students and employees. And, just to throw a further wrench into the works, I was disappointed after I took the test to learn that the color they were calling violet in the results appeared as a very ugly magenta tone on my monitor. I loathe that color, but I’ve always loved violet. So what about my diagnosis of having lost all of my magical dreams? If I’d seen that color as actually violet, I might have picked it first or second, and this would likely have resulted in me being diagnosed as an individual who is leading a life of rich enchantment. That’s certainly a different picture of me. What picture did you get of yourself? Do you find this to be an accurate test, based on your experience with it, or is it utter nonsense?

How can this be useful to us in the web industries?

The language of this test is reminiscent of the language we use to describe design and usability. We’re talking about people’s behavioral methods, their goals, their personalities and their longings. The major corporations that use this test genuinely believe it to be a valuable tool. So, could it be that, if our targeted user group is a bevy of slack-jawed youths who feel disenchanted with life and unable to make up their minds (grey/violet), a yellow-based design would persuade them to become active, exhilarated users? Or if our demographic is a group of defensive and obstinate republicans, and the goal of our site is to convince them to ban the death penalty, would a blue website show them that we are sympathetic to their feelings, and that we are going to lovingly sway them to our democratic position? I don’t have the answer to this question, but I’d love to see it tested out.

Just for Fun My husband, Liam, volunteered to take this quiz. It was neat to watch him make his choices, but it turns out he is:

Defensive. Feels his position is threatened or inadequately established. Determined to pursue his objectives despite the anxiety induced by opposition.

So, we’ve got a dissatisfied woman and a defensive man. What a charming couple we make! I really hope, for the well-being of their patients, that Dr. Lüscher and his pals occasionally have something nice to say about the people who take their tests. How about you’re a dandy human being and the world is lucky you were born? And now, if you’ll excuse me, we’ve got to go to therapy!

If you’d like to read more about the methods behind this interesting quiz, try this article.