This has been adapted form short film I appeared in for Innovations at Work. Originally published as a short film here.
What was the first major breakthrough in terms of using colour in design?
I think that the major moment in designing with colour is the leap to the reproduction of colour photography. Most brilliantly made relevant by the fashion mags of the early fifties and paving the way for all modern editorial and advertising. It was particularly influential on advertising. The ability to represent products in full colour had an incredible influence over how we communicate ideas about products and their places in our lives. It drove consumerism on in a way that is hard to imagine now.
John Berger said “Seeing comes before words”. How is this useful as an idea? Colour photography it is the most information in the quickest, most primal form. More than a headline or a column of text.
What have been stand-out uses of colour in design?
To my mind First Direct and Orange felt like a new wave of creating brand character with colour. They made very clear bold colour statements about who they were.
Later on Sony’s ball and explosion ads said we live in a world brimming with colour.
The job of an identity is to prove that your product is relevant within its market. Colours usage will be part of the things that define that market. In magazines it might be a group of fashion or health and fitness brands that define their colours. Newspapers do something different again.
You might try and fit into your market or you might be more reactionary – creating a colour family that says you are new and different… if new and different is also better.
How do we approach colour when designing for print?
Joseph Albers says that colour is the most relative medium. I think he means this technically (as colours read very differently according to the other colours they are with) but it is also a cultural issue. Red represents different things for different entities in different contexts:
– Arsenal football club
– Virgin Atlantic
– Ferrari
– A red dress
– A deck of cards
– A flag
– A flower
There is a fallacy – I think started by the usually brilliant David Ogilvy – that says people don’t read white out of black text. As I understand it his research stated that in the context of an ad of its time – in an early 60s magazine – people didn’t read reversed out text. That, to me, is an over simplification of a useful tool.
Differences between colour use in marketing materials versus magazine design versus press ads?
Editorials job is to inform and entertain from a journalistic or creative view. You are buying stories from tastemakers, experts and journalists. Marketings job is to quickly tell you why this thing Is relevant to you. One is a message you have bought into in some way. The other is trying to cut through the noise quickly to get a message to a potential customer. Colours works for these goals in different ways
Top tips and examples from printed materials
1. Be systematic – but not at the expense of what looks good???. Hierarchy and navigation use colour too – not just layout. Is you system chromatic? or complimentary? Does colour denote change or is it something else? (Monocle). The more colours you use harder it is to get the m to sit well.
2. Be objective – designing isn’t “I use blue because I like blue” designing is “blue is right because…”
3. Be appropriate – A newspaper is an extraordinary piece of design. The colour family for the guardian is part of the way finding system that helps you navigate extraordinary amount of information they deliver.
Where does using colour go wrong?
The biggest mistake is not being legible. It sounds simple but there are levels of legibility and they are partly determined by colour. Some messages are supposed to shout. Some are supposed to be more subtly nuanced. Deciding what is right and what works is the process of design.
The second is being ugly. The more colours you use the harder it is for them to sit well with each other and serve a purpose
How do these rules of colour change when designing for online?
In some ways they don’t but there are a lot of technical issue to account for. Conversion and checking RGB is quite simple now but you will have to compromise as some CMYK just doesn’t translate.
More importantly – although there is a dominant culture of “screens can do anything” I think that most screen based products require a level of simplicity to function well and convey an appropriate message. Generally speaking colours and hierarchies have to be reduced in order to create function.
ideas/forms/functions 