The Psychology of Colour

BLUE

Blue projects the idea of being under control, being calm and collected.

RED

Red is a hot colour and denotes the idea of danger

Choose colours to convey the following:

Aggression RED

Friendly PURPLE

Solid ORANGE

Weak CREAM

Serious GREY

Depressed GREEN/BLUE

The colour quiz

 A quote by Tay Vaughan (1998):

“At the beginning of a project, the screen is a blank canvas, ready for you, the multimedia designer, to express your craft. The screen will change again and again during the course of your project as you experiment, as you stretch and reshape elements, draw new objects and throw out old ones, and test various colors and effects – creating a vehicle for your message…many multimedia designers are known to experience a mild shiver when they pull down the New… menu and draw their first colors onto a fresh screen…this screen represents a powerful and seductive avenue for channelling creativity.”

I find Vaughan’s comments to be encouraging and positive. As I have an interest in art, I can associate with the “blank canvas” image, however for me an element of inspiration is also necessary at the start of the designing process as without inspiration or the generation of creative ideas, nothing new can be made.

1. If you have an animation showing steps and describing text

Problem: while you view you cannot read

Solution: use narrated animation (modality effect helps you to understand it better)

2. If the pace of the animation is too fast and the content is too rich

Problem: you can’t engage deeper with the content, cognitive overload

Solution: break down the animation into segments – segmenting. Use short breaks or otherwise, give learners prior instruction – penetrating

3. If you have an animation that is too fast with background music

Problem: Incidental processing is occurring

Solution: Weeding – to reduce the load. Make the narration concise and coherent – get rid of irrelevant material. Signalling – guide the learners through the cognitive process using key words in headings.

Colourful Websites that are jam packed with multimedia:

• www.mcdonalds.com.au/
• www.barbie.everythinggirl.com/

The Seven Principals of Multimedia Design

1.       Multimedia Principal - Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.

2.       Spatial Contiguity Principle – How easy is it for your eyes to move? Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

3.       Temporal Contiguity Principle – Don’t miss the message, present corresponding words and pictures together.

4.       Coherence Principle – Animation distracts. Don’t use sounds. Students learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.

5.       Redundancy Principle - Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation, narration, and on-screen text.

6.       Individual Differences Principle – Design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners and for high-spatial learners rather than low-spatial learners

Provided examples of multimedia elements you would recommend:

Videos – I would recommend videos with narration. I would also ensure that there is no background noise to distract learners and no text to draw attention away from the images. Presenting scenarios in videos is a good method of learning however, if I am to include scenarios, I would want real life videos and not animation videos.