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It may seem surprising to learn that colors do indeed have a psychological effect on the customer and product. This can be better understood by taking an example into consideration.

An average American male of age thirty, and who enjoyed baseball in his childhood so much that most of the memorable times of his childhood are connected to his participation in his high school’s baseball team.

With this attachment to the varsity team, he is sure to have an affinity with the color of the team. Supposing the color of the team was red, and then he will definitely have a liking for red, and so on. Henceforth, whenever he sees red, he sort of remembers the memorable times he had spent in his varsity team as a member of the team; and thus will choose red for most color schemes.

Consequently, there may be cases of people dreading some colors. Supposing a customer was the victim of an accident. Although the wounds of the accident may have healed, the vision of the color of the van or car that had hit the customer will remain vivid in the eyes of the customer.

So if the vehicle was a blue vehicle, whenever the customer saw anything blue in color, unpleasant memories of the accident tend to return to the customer. With all this, it can be seen that many colors are usually attributed to some psychological stimulus that may have affected the customer a few years or decades ago. These colors will remain in the minds of the visitor for a long time to come.

Similarly, there will be many colors that one will either hate or love because of some psychological stimulus that may have affected everyday life some years ago. There are also many colors that have some subconscious reference on one’s collective psyche that in turn helps in effectively communicating the important aspects of a product.

For example, the colors red and blue are usually used to show hot and cold for lots of products. This may seem like common sense, but in reality, the hottest of fires glow blue, and sometimes, sever cold also leads to burns!

However, people have usually grown with this association of red for hot and blue for cold in their minds, which is rather difficult to change. And this is why it can be said that the usage of color association for communicating some aspects of products can be influential on potential customers.

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Here, we are using the font-size 62.5%, remember from earlier when we covered the font-size property, the percentage is based up line height. So the default font size will be 62.5% of whatever the line size is. So if we define different line heights in various places throughout our page and don't add a new define for the font size in those particular place, it will use the default 62.5%

Ok, I said earlier that we would go over what “em” is and since it's being used here, I guess this is as good a time as any. When using px to set font sizes, line heights, etc.. you are setting an exact number for that font or line height, etc.. which means that how it is viewed is dependent upon the viewers screen resolution. A 12px font will look differently on a 600x800 screen that it does a 1024x780 screen.

The em setting is basically a scalable size and how it is displayed is calculated based on the font-size property of the parent element.

What the body selector did above is set the default text size to be about 10px. 1 normal em is about 12px. So with this base established, you can use “em” instead of px to allow for scaling. Which means that your page can look the way you designed it on any resolution screen.

Just remember that the “em” calculates from whatever the parent size is. To explain, let's say we've kept our 1 em at 12px because we didn't scale it down by setting the 62.5% like we did in the wordpress css body css above.

So if we were to use 1.2em to define our paragraph text size, this would be multiplied by our default 12px for a slightly larger font, however if we had set our paragraph to 62.55% and then were working within a paragraph and set some text to be 1.2em, it would calculate on our already reduced 62.55% for a figure slightly larger than the 10px but less than 12px.

There really was no simple way to explain that. I hope you didn't get thrown off there, the main thing to remember is that you can always back your style.css file up and make changes until you get the look you want. They key is to not be afraid of it.

The cool thing is that we can also use the em to scale our images, so the whole page is able to expand and contract as needed to fit in the surfers screen, looking exactly as we intended it to look.