Colour is very important in the instant impact websites have on us, and the old mind plays a part in this aspect of them, too. The usual framework for our modern understanding of colour is the one we learn at school, the spectrum.

            

    If we study art or physics, we’ll soon learn that this is the way colour is thought about very widely, based on science. The spectrum is all about wavelengths, and nobody could mount a serious argument saying that colour doesn’t come to us this way. But is the science of it what we need to know in regard to websites and the old mind? What if the science is correct, but at the same time irrelevant?  

    There are other ways to see colour when we assess it from the standpoint of the unconscious mind, and that’s the one this website is concerned with. It has every bit as much integrity as one based on light wavelengths.

    There’s a sequence here. It was originally put forward by Max Luscher, a psychologist who produced a deep psychological test based on colour in 1947.

            
  

• In the primitive mind, the constant association brought a sequence of meanings to the following series, and engrained it into humans. Scientifically, black is not a colour, but yet we perceive it as one. Here is the sequence:  

• Black – as in the night, when activity has to stop through lack of light: stands for the concept of nothingness and negation;

• Yellow – as in the breaking of day: supersedes black, and for those who’ve survived the perils of night, means that potential is coming, in the form of the new day;

• Green – as perceived in the immediate vicinity while passing through lush vegetation, towards water, shows where wild animals gather: represents activity and progress;

• Red – as perceived in the shedding of blood, the necessary step involved in killing game before being able to eat: stands for combat;

• Blue – as perceived when looking upwards at the sky, lying on the ground, satiated by food: indicates tranquility. 

    This sequence is so strong and has come from such repetition through pre-history that it leaves the colours with a lasting value in the old mind, in the same way as symbols do.
    
    This is why undertakers don’t come to the door wearing yellow. Colour is tied to meaning.

    Survival once depended on seeing things that don’t fit, and colour is a big aspect of this. To see the white flash of a tiger’s tooth in a green bush was a matter of survival. Traces of this colour consciousness remain hard-wired in the mind today.

    There are obviously more colours than just those represented above, and there are multiple meanings that extend from colour mixtures. In building websites today, all too often a wide variety of options tends to be used for no other reason but that they're available. A conscious-mind appeal on the basis of colour liveliness is irrelevant if the visitor doesn't make it safely through the first crucial moment.

    On a website the colours that are visible need to be congruent with the textual meaning displayed, if old-mind suspicion is not to be aroused. Where and how colour appears on a website is another important component in preventing that one-twentieth of a second alarm state that turns a visitor away.