AB: All-Round Nice Guy

The colours you use in your logo help to promote your image in the most subtle of ways - by the power of association. Furthermore, the *number* of colors you use in your logo impacts on the options when reproducing your logo, and the costs thereof - so to make the most of your choices, here’s some practical advice on how to select the best colours for your logo design or redesign.

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Colour (or ‘color’ - you choose) plays an important, yet subtle role in communicating your brand to your audience. If chosen well, it may not be the most obvious thing that adds to your customers’ recognition, but chosen badly, it can take away from your desired effect - that is, being remembered and being associated with your business.

The two aspects of colour that I can relate to you are selection and range. The colours you select will need to compliment who you are and what you do - but the range of colours available to you will determine what colours you can select. It’s the cart-before-the-horse thing, so let’s start with the engine room first - the range of colours available to you.

COLOUR SPACES

First off, welcome to the year 2006. Be very glad that you’re here, now, and not living with the colour technologies of 50 years ago. The colour options available to designers in this decade are so vastly wider than that of our ancestors: we have a prevalence of colour TV, CRT & LCD screens to work with; we have high quality four-colour printing available from broadsheet newspapers, the local print shop, and even our personal printers; we have cost parity with four colour printing compared to spot colour printing; and we have a public who likes a splash of colour on almost everything printable - even on their milk cartons.

The opportunity to use full colour over spot colour, greyscale or monochrome has never been better. So when you design your logo, there’s less reason to even consider those colour spaces, right? … uh… Wrong.

You still need to plan for your logo to be used in all possible colour spaces - even if you have to make some compromises along the way - so that your logo can still ‘be you’, even under adverse conditions.

The top colour space is ‘full colour’. This is typically referred to as ‘four-colour’, ‘four-colour process’, just ‘Process’, or simply ‘CMYK’. The basic premise is that by combining four inks in different percentages (cyan, magenta, yellow and black [K]), you can get a very wide range of colours - almost all the colours that you’ve ever seen on any printed page or surface. Added to the mix now, ‘full colour’ can also be ’six-colour’ or ‘Hex Colour’, by adding two additional inks to increase the range of colours available. Only large printing presses (or small ‘photo-quality’ ink jets) use this technique.

The next rung down the colour ladder is spot colour. Rather than mixing four colours to get *most* of the possible colour range, in this case, the printer (the person) simply grabs a tin of the colour that you want off the shelf, and prints with that ink. This can then reproduce all the colours that CMYK can do, plus it can add in flouro colours, metallic inks and such like - to get a 100% perfect match with the colour that you want. The problem is that if your logo has many discrete colours, you need lots of (discrete) spot colours to reproduce it - that’s why most complex colour printing ends up as CMYK - with four colours, you can reproduce *most* colours, so it’s a known constant. Spot colour was the ‘only’ full colour many many years ago, and is used lass and less in mainstream media, but it is still the main colour space used in packaging.

Beyond (behind?) spot colour is greyscale and/or monotones. This colour space is easily understood if you consider that you’re only using one base colour, but all possible shades of that base colour. Hence greyscale uses blank ink, and can reproduce 10% grey, 50% grey, etc - whatever shade of black you require. Substitute black for another colour, and you’ve got a monotone image. Greyscales are typically the domain of newspapers and laser-printed documents these days, and are fading fast as more newspapers do more ful lcolour sections, and as more businesses use colour laser printers over their greyscale workhorses.

Finally, there’s the bitmap (or mono) colour space - this is where you only have one colour, and it’s all or nothing - either solid of that colour, or none at all. It sounds rare, but it’s surprisingly common - if you’ve ever received a fax, you’ll see the end result of a very low resolution bitmap. Other typical uses of bitmaps are for handling logos for physical applications, eg: signage and promotional materials (t-shirts, anyone?).

HOW TO DESIGN FOR DIFFERENT COLOUR SPACES

Consider this less of a ‘design rule’, and more of a ’strong guideline”‘: Design from the ground up. The danger is designing a fantastic logo in full colour, but the logo is unrecognisable when forced into greyscale or a bitmap.

The basic premise is an old graphic designer’s adage: If you can’t design in 1 colour, don’t design in 2 colours. And if you can’t design in 2 colours, don’t design in full colour.

To apply this to the world of logo design, first try to work out a strong logo using only one colour - black is the most obvious choice, especially if you plan on doing a little newspaper advertising, or indeed, any faxing in the lifespan of your business. By using software programs like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Flash, you’ll be constrained (only slightly) to using hard-edged lines for your first few trials - this is an excellent place to start toying around with a bitmap version of your logo.

The unfortunate part of starting at the bottom of the colour pile, so to speak - is that’s it’s not particularly exciting down there. It’s limiting, but that’s the whole point - it’s still gotta have some impact even in one colour - adding colour won’t necessarily help a weak design.

If/when you feel the need to go up to two colours or greyscale, then feel free to go there - but don’t race ahead to full colour just yet. I can’t necessarily assist you with specific colour choices without getting to know you first, but rest assured that all possible colours within (and outside of) the rainbow have already been used - so don’t be afraid to both 1) experiment with colour, as well as 2) look around businesses in your general sector, and tread cautiously through, but not necessarily within other competitors’ colours.

The best news is that if you’re going to be working predominately within electronic mediums, then the sky is literally the limit - the red/green/blue (RGB) pixels that make up our computer and TV screens can cover more areas of colour than CMYK printing can - although they still can’t make a gold colour look metallic, so beware - it’s not hard for a well-intentioned gold colour to end up as ‘baby poo brown’. Which leads up in to…

SELECTING YOUR COLOURS

It’s a subtle, almost ephemeral thing - trying to choose the best colours for your logo or design project involves either a wide range of knowledge on such matters as psychology, sociology and marketing - OR - an intuitive sense of style. While I can’t gift you either in the space of 10 minutes, here’s some good guidelines to keep you on a good path:

1) Observe the obvious
Your own business might naturally inspire a certain colour range: greens for a nursery or environmental organisation, or golds for ‘prestige’ consulting businesses. In all cases though, look at whether this ‘obvious’ choice is a real requirement, or just a common cliché. Don’t be afraid to ingore the obvious to really stand out from your competitors - but also keep in mind that some clichés become so engrained in the minds of your customers, that bucking the trend may make you look like an outsider.

2) Less is more
There is a strong temptation to use a wide array of colours in your logo - hey, extra colours don’t cost more money on the internet, right? True - but the same restraint that you should show in your font choices (remember the two-font-sandwich?) should also be used when choosing colours. If you need two blues, why not try the lighter shade a direct shade *of* the darker? Consolidating colours makes it easier for spot colour reproductions later on, but also simplifies the overall visual - without a great loss of impact.

3) Check out the competition
No need to copy them, in fact, the aim here is to make sure that you *don’t* copy anything from your competitor’s logos. Hold your competitor’s logos in high regard, and take note of the essense of their logo, but don’t pinch anything. If you can, spot any trends across a range of their logos, and either choose to observe or to ignore the obvious.

4) Colours can create moods
In days gone by, the first colours on the scene were the basics: fire engine red, reflex blue, racing green and, well, Kodak yellow. The availability of colour now though, gives rise to the subtle world of psychology - more specifically, generating moods. You probably are aware of the basics: red for fast or hot things; blue for super-cool or super-laid back; green for environmentally aware; white for squeaky clean; black and rich browns for that rich leather combination… Learn to pick out some more subtle colour combinations though, and test how your logo might look in a less saturated (richer) version of your favourite choice - or boost up the brightness and see how it responds, and what is seems to be emparting about your business.

5) Watch current trends
More generally, take a look at what’s happening around the world for the latest trends in colours: is there a move towards bold primary colours or towards richer earthy tones? Is grey the new black, or are flouros making a comeback?? Resources like logopond.com are a good place to start if you need to see a random smattering of what’s hot and what’s not.

6) When all else fails, go tonal
In a spirit of self-deprecation, this guideline fits me perfectly: if you can’t decide on a colour, then don’t - go a neutral tone or tones, use your logo as an all-purpose-but-not-overly-colourful-in-itself tool, and build colour into your marketing documents to add pizazz only when required. You don’t *have* to use colour - for some businesses, it’s only going to get in the way of the message you want to send to your customers. Consider that a greyscale photo shows the ‘experience’ in a person’s face, but not the shaving rash. So be brave. Choose nothing. Perhaps black *is* the new black.

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So - in conclusion, I’d like to apologise partly for not actually answering any of your specific queries about colour, and merely giving you the pros and cons of more than a dozen things to consider.

On the other hand, colour is a fickle thing - what works for one may not necessarily work for another - and that’s even before you get into calibrating your colours. But that, as they say in the classics, is another story.

AB out