Category: Yellow

Color Priority: An Experiment

2/7/2013

Originally published Nov. 4, 2012

Fall as a season is about 3 months short for me. With all due respect to the calendar’s dates, here’s how it goes in Minnesota: Spring 3 months, Summer 3 months, Fall 4-6 weeks, and Winter 5 months. There’s a couple extra weeks in there but this is a flexible calendar. Following is a more detailed analysis, if you are curious.

Spring lasts from about April to June so I’d say 3 months, give or take a couple of weeks. Summer runs from somewhere in June until maybe sometime in September, so a good 3 months there as well. Fall is from sometime in September through pretty much most of October making it the shortest season at about 4 or 6 weeks tops. Winter can kick in during October but most likely early November and lasts through March, sometimes even into April making it the longest season here at 5 months plus.

When Fall rolls around, it is an intense and concentrated period of color and if you are into capturing it with a camera then one must get busy and focus. Fall also has the same issue as Spring, that being the wind. If one subtracts all the days when it is too windy to shoot, I’m guessing half of those possible 30-40 days of the season just went out the window. If only Fall was Winter we could really kick back and enjoy it.

At any rate, one day while I was enjoying the display of colors, I got to thinking there sure is a lot of competition out there for attention. When we survey the landscape, which color grabs our eye the most: red, yellow or green? (I didn’t have any orange in my test acreage.) I guess it’s the hidden psychologist/marketing director inside of me that wanted to know the answer to this question.

Here I tried to find trees in order of Green-red-yellow,

Green-yellow-red,

Yellow-green-red,

Yellow-red-green,

Red-green-yellow,

and finally Red-yellow-green.

What color did you notice first? Did it matter what order they were in?

The tree color I noticed first was:

Green
Yellow
Red
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The tree color I noticed second was:
Yellow
Red
Green
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The tree color I noticed last was:
Red
Green
Yellow
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Then I got to thinking some more. Perhaps my experiment had too many variables such as size of tree, number of leaves, and percentage of frame each tree occupies. So I thought I would try it on a smaller scale with one leaf representing each color. Do you notice any differences now?

Green-yellow-red,

Green-red-yellow,

Yellow-red-green,

Yellow-green-red,

Red-yellow-green,

and last but not least, Red-green-yellow,

The leaf color I noticed first was:

Green
Yellow
Red
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The leaf color I noticed second was:

Red
Yellow
Green
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The leaf color I noticed last was:

Red
Yellow
Green
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Perhaps another variable could be whether you are female or male.

I am:Male
Female
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Thank you for taking my polls. Maybe this will help you make your next marketing decision, at least as far as color is concerned!

Color Priority: An Experiment

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