
19
ANATOMY OF DESIGN
During the late 1960s, at the height of the youth culture's psychedelic chromatic
color revolution when, as if overnight, shrill vibrating colors replaced basic
primaries and earth tones, a few mass-market paperback book publishers tried a
new marketing and packaging scheme. They repeated the same typographic or
illustrative cover design in different colors, theorizing that different consumer
demographics—men, women, old, young—would viscerally or intuitively respond
more impulsively to color than content and therefore be more in the mood to
buy books. Anyone who has taken Psych 101 in college knows that color hue
affects behavior ...