PPG Expert Comments on the Positive Impact of Color in Classrooms

Maria Oliveira, PPG color and design manager, discusses how specific colors are thought to have a positive impact and enhance the learning experience in a classroom. It’s often said that color helps create a learning environment that improves visual processing, reduces stress and challenges brain development through visual stimulation, relationships and pattern seeking. It’s important to determine the desired energy or behavior you want to create in a room — happy, energetic, creative, focus or calm. Then, determine the amount of time spent in a space and desired energy level.  PPG’s Wheat Sheaf, Garlic Clove, Shadow Taupe, and Stargazer, are comfortable, conservative, stable and versatile, providing a safe, secure environment. Warm colors of rose, coral and honey, such as PPG’s Rose Petal, Coral Cove, or Wayward Wind, are nurturing and embracing, and create a friendly atmosphere. Warm colors can also be used to reduce the scale and size of large spaces, making them more intimate. Cool colors of pale green, mint, sea foam, robin’s egg, aqua, sky, denim and soft blue are refreshing, calming, relaxing, soothing and expansive in a classroom. Softer surroundings created by subtle or cooler hues have centripetal action which enhances the ability to concentrate. In 2019, the PPG Foundation donated $6.8 million in support of STEM programs, impacting more than 712,000 students.