Have you ever wondered why Facebook is blue? It turns out there's a a good reason. Last week, Leo Widrich explained in Fast Company that Mark Zuckerberg's red-green color blindness makes blue the color he sees best. That's why blue was chosen for Facebook. The article provides additional insights on the "meaning" of color in marketing materials, including which colors appeal to women and which appeal to men.

Reading about perceptions of color is interesting, but at the end of the day color is subjective. As Dan Lundmark points out on Quora, 7-10 percent of men and 0.4 percent of women find the colors red and green difficult to recognize, making color blindness a significant issue. 

People from different cultures also perceive color differently. For example, in Chinese culture red is a color of fortune and joy, the primary color of weddings. White is associated with death and mourning. According to Kissmetrics, women hate orange yet it's one of my favorite colors. 

Widrich used a portion of the Kissmetrics graphic below in his article, though he left out the caveat from the original: color preferences are not universal. Their 2010 version describes these color and consumer profiles:

There are many color options available for buttons and other design elements in NationBuilder stock themes. With a bit of work in HTML and CSS, you can add a custom button in any color. 

The first step in adding a custom button to your website is understanding how to create a custom website theme. This is actually very easy to do! You can build a custom theme based on any stock theme, so you'll be able to see the original code and build off of it rather than starting from scratch. This is particularly useful if you've never built an entire theme yourself (like me). You can also change back to a stock theme at any time if your having problems with your custom theme. And if you want assistance customizing your website, we work with a roster of certified NationBuilder Architects who can design a completely tailored website for you or provide the design skills to tweak the one you're already using. 

SCSS was a foreign language to me before NationBuilder. It extends CSS, making it easy to do things like create rounded-edge buttons using mixins. This mixin tutorial by John W. Long taught me basically all I know about SCSS and is particularly useful if you want to add a button to download a PDF on your website or make a single button stand out.  

You can also change the colors of your website in your custom theme. If you're not comfortable with this type of tweaking and you'd like additional help with theme customization, a NationBuilder Architect is your best resource.