Why your office needs more yellow

In London’s Tate Modern, a £50 million Mark Rothko painting was defaced by the founder of “yellowism” – a movement whose aims are just as unintelligible as your average art gallery catalogue.

“Yellowism is not art, and Yellowism isn’t anti-art. It’s an element of contemporary visual culture. It’s not an artistic movement,” said Vladimir Umanets, obliquely.

“It’s not art, it’s not reality, it’s just Yellowism. It can’t be presented in a gallery of art, it can be presented only in a Yellowistic chambers.”

It also makes no sense at all that when he graffittied the painting, he used black paint to write his name and the words “A potential piece of yellowism”. But, that is art. If you don’t have any idea what a modern artist is going on about, just pretend like the rest of us.

Umanets is not the only person passionate about the colour yellow. Owner of By Design Interiors & Styling, Maria Ode, says the sunny colour is “by far” one of the best colours to incorporate into an open plan office.

“Yellow is the sun bringing warmth and life. It shines with optimism, enlightenment and happiness. Yellow will stimulate mental processes, stimulates the nervous system, activate memory and encourages communication and spark creative thoughts,” she says.

“A training room with yellow wall behind trainer will help understanding and retention of information for the participants in the training.”

However, red has a completely different impact. According to researchers at Rochester and the University of Munich, even a flash of red can cause people to do more poorly in a test because they associate the colour with mistakes and failures.

Red is the colour of pen used in marking errors in school papers, according to a report in Science Daily. So, it might be an idea to leave the colour out of interior decor ... but it has a completely different effect if women wear it.

In their study of 272 restaurant customers, researchers Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob found not only that male patrons gave higher tips than female patrons in general but that men gave between 14.6 per cent and 26.1 per cent more to waitresses wearing red, while colour had no effect on female patrons’ tipping behaviour at all.

“As red colour has no negative effect on women customers, it could be in their interest to wear red clothes at work,” the authors say.

Other research found that when humans see red, their reactions become faster and more forceful.

Blue is the favourite colour of Americans (35 per cent), followed by green, purple and red.

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