7 Deadly Color Combinations to Avoid In Your Advertising

Different color combinations work well for different purposes. However NOT every color combination is good for advertising. There are many color combinations to avoid in your ad copies.

Actually, the most important thing in every advertisement is a good readability. If your advertisement message is too difficult to read, nobody will. If nobody reads it, it goes unnoticed. If it goes unnoticed, you don’t have any results. No customers, no sales, no money. Just waste of your advertising budget.

In fact, nowadays due to the lack of time and thanks to the information abundance people don’t read texts. They SCAN them. Therefore in order to catch your reader attention, you need to create easily readable designs and texts.
I have listed a few of the color combinations you should avoid when creating your advertisements.

1. Green and Yellow
Since yellow and green are too close together, this color combination can be too difficult to read. There is a lack of contrast that arouses interest. Your ad will simply go unnoticed.

2. Green and Purple
Although it is possible to make interesting and eye-catching designs from green and purple colors, purple text on a green background may be just too difficult to read. Therefore mix it up with, white, gray and black or use tints and shades to reduce brightness. This is a color combination you definitely need to avoid.

3. Light colors on a light background
Yes, they look nice and calming but are too difficult to read. Unless you want to hide some information from your advertisement readers, don’t use a combination of light-colored text on a light background.

4. Neon colors
Although they look eye-catching, they will tire and irritate your reader’s eyes.

5. Colored and textured background
Don’t put text on a bright colored and textured background or it will be unreadable. Turn down the opacity or place your text in a separate box with a light background to make sure it’s readable.

6. Blue and red
There are many situations when blue and red color combinations work great together, but not for the texts. Both colors are so strong that they clash terribly.

7. Dark backgrounds
Unless you have a good reason, avoid putting red, blue or purple text on a black background, because they are very hard to read.

Moreover try to avoid putting white text on a black background, too. As I mentioned before, readers either read or scan texts. If they scan, they notice only the most emphasized words. In the case these words arouse interest, they start reading to understand the subject.

Before you decide to use white text on a dark background consider if your readers will scan or read the text.

Usually, people read paragraph text, but scan headings, titles, and labels.

Therefore, while it may be a good choice to use white text on a dark background for titles and headings to highlight them and grab readers attention, it’s advisable to NOT use white text on a dark background for paragraph texts, because that strains the reader’s eyes.

If you still want to put white paragraph text on a black background, then rather use light gray color, since that will be easier for your reader’s eyes.

However, there are few situations when advertisers deliberately put a white text on a dark background. For example, if they put some legal information in their advertisement that they want to go unnoticed. Leasing interest rates, for example, or additional costs. In this case, some marketers deliberately put white text on a black background and make the text particularly small to reduce the readability even more.

If you want to learn more about good design principles, read my book “Graphic Design for Beginners: Fundamental Graphic Design Principles that Underlie Every Design Project“. The idea of this book is not just telling you theoretical principles about using colors, creating compositional balance and pairing typefaces correctly, but to show you how you can apply these principles in the real world to improve your marketing results. You will be educated enough to understand when the design created really helps you to communicate your marketing message and when it doesn’t.

Color is one of the most-remembered elements of your brand and can make a big impact on how it is perceived. Each color arises particular emotions and associations. When you are choosing your brand colors, keep in mind that different color variations and combinations give different associations and feelings. Learn more about color psychology and how to use predefined color schemes in my article “How to Choose Your Brand Colors?“.