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I found meme about big green button.

When people visit download sites (like software directories, file hosting sites, torrents, etc) after completing reading page title and deciding to download they look for big green button...

I have interest to know origin of color and size choice.

I found this sources:

Also possibly related links:

UPDATE. Interesting color marking agreements can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage

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gavenkoa
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2 Answers2

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The green and red colors are traditionally used in the engineering as "positive, allowed, safe, yes" (green) and "negative, forbidden, danger, no" (red) indication.

This tradition is very old and widespread and all people are taught to perceive these colors in this way.

So, it would be very unwise to use these colors in other meaning, because this will cause the user got confused.

johnfound
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    In Japan, red would be considered "positive, allowed, safe, yes". Generalization can be dangerous. – Bart Gijssens Feb 12 '13 at 08:21
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    So, in Japan the traffic lights are red for "OK to pass"? Good to know. :P Maybe it was true in 15-th century, but not now and not here. – johnfound Feb 12 '13 at 08:26
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    @BartGijssens that applies to the perception of red as a general colour, but not when used as an indicator. The same applies to most of East Asia. – JohnGB Feb 12 '13 at 12:15
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    In Japan, like in most other countries, there is a traffic law that explains the meaning of the traffic lights and the required behaviour of people using the public roads. That does not take away that it is a generalization to state that all people are taught to perceive red as negative, forbidden, danger, no. There are variations depending on context and culture. – Bart Gijssens Feb 12 '13 at 12:41
  • @JohnGB: do you have some source for this? Japanese people have always warned me not to simply use red as an indicator for warnings, errors as it can be interpreted as positive, or as offensive. – Bart Gijssens Feb 12 '13 at 12:43
  • @BartGijssens these are different things IMO. For example I like red cars and the red color in generally and don't think the red cars are dangerous or forbidden. But we are talking about engineering and ergonomics here - where red indicators and red buttons always have negative meaning. Regardless of the culture. – johnfound Feb 12 '13 at 12:56
  • @johnfound late comment but: in many Asian countries red and green have different meanings. For example red in stock trade mean "up" and green means "down". Also red means happiness and it's a positive color. Red light in semaphores (to take your example) is just for coherence with countries from where they imported cars (like left side driving in Japan or left-to-right direction when writing in horizontal). They learned it's like that. It's so widely accepted that sometimes (not always) you may ignore this issue (unless you specifically target only their market)... – Adriano Repetti Jan 11 '16 at 12:05
  • ...but you should carefully consider every implication when dealing with dangerous/critical devices/UIs or when feeling is involved. Usually industrial stack lights follow western convention (red = alert) but exceptions exist (for example I saw temperature indicators where red means low...sigh). You should check each specific scenario and do not generalize. My wife is Asian and after years I still find culture-related differences. – Adriano Repetti Jan 11 '16 at 12:10
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Psychologically speaking, red means caution, stop, or no, and green means good, healthy, or go. See: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/stop-on-red-a-monkey-study-suggests-that-the-effects-of-color-lie-deep-in-evolution.html and: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/people-places-and-things/201002/positive-design-color

David
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