Graduation Year

Spring 2014

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Department

Psychology

Reader 1

Jennifer Groscup

Reader 2

Sheila Walker

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2014 Diarra D. Anderson

Abstract

This study examined the effect of colors and typography on attraction towards a product, tones evoked by the product, and likelihood that a participant would buy a product. Prior research has addressed how color and type influence visual design and those who come in contact with it in a multifaceted way. To measure this, participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk were asked to take part in an online survey on Surveymonkey.com. Assigned to one of four conditions of color and font combinations, Black or Purple paired with Modern or Script, participants answered questions about a sample product, a soda can. The study examined the combined and individual effects of the colors Black and Purple and the font types Modern and Script on the participants’ likelihood to purchase the product, their attraction toward it, and the perceived tone the product gives off. A 2x2 ANOVA was run to measure likelihood of purchase and attraction and a Pearson’s Chi-Squared test was used to measure both tonal questions. It was found that attraction to product was 1.19 times more likely with the product displaying Script font regardless of color and likelihood of purchase was 1.15 times higher with Script font regardless of color. Purple and Modern were most highly associated with the tonal word “Modern” for tonal question number one and for Black, the overall largest tonal association term was “Traditional,” for tonal question number. The finding for the color Purple approached significance and the other two of these findings were consistent with the hypothesis.

Download

This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

Share

COinS