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Is Red the Fairest One of them All?

Featured Author:

Igor Asselbergs

Igor Asselbergs started out as illustrator. He co-founded Tricolore, a color design consultancy in Amsterdam. Currently he is CEO of Colorjinn, a software company specialized in applications for color visualization. Igor is guest lecturer at a design college, a consultant for the paint industry, and has his own color blog, Livelygrey. http://livelygrey.com

More articles from this author:

• Altering Mood Via Light in Your Photography
• 5 Tips for Picking Colors for Your Home
• The Role of Color in Marketing

Red is usually regarded as a color which visually leaps out. Red stand out. Red jumps off the page. But does it really?

I found two interesting pictures on Flickr. Both contain a red button.

The one button is highly visable, the other is almost hidden in its surroundings, even while it takes up a large part of the picture.

How come the one button stands out a lot more than the other?

It’s not because the button is red.

It’s because the background is NOT red. From a design perspective, that’s a pretty important distinction…

Once again it’s not about the colors, it’s about how the colors relate to one another.