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The Art and Science of Color

Using color to jumpstart your catalog’s performance

Color theory is something that most designers are not exposed to today. As color can be a most powerful tool to show off your merchandise and attract prospects into considering purchase from your catalog or site, it’s time your creative department become better acquainted with the use of color.

When you think of it, the cost of printing your catalog with poor color choices, or no color choices, does not change from the cost of printing a catalog that has the best color for your market. That being the case, it costs you NOTHING to make your catalog creative more powerful when you utilize color better!

The way color is used, particularly on your covers can make or break the success of your catalog. Even inside the catalog, color can create a shift in how people read, what they see first, and even how they perceive your brand. The right color elements can make your merchandise look elegant and valuable, while the wrong color – or too much or too little – can make it look cheesy or just plain unappealing.

Consider the power of blue in American Express… the famous light turquoise that says “Tiffany”… Fedex’s warm red and violet-blue, and Mary Kay’s signature pink. These colors in themselves tell the consumer about who the companies are, what they stand for.

How does color work to show off a product?

Color is relative, and it’s somewhat subjective. It changes the perception of everything around it, and it is effected by the other things on the page. This is the way the cones of the eye work – it’s not taste or judgment, it’s physiology.

An example of how this works is this: If you surround a color item with more of the same family of color, it no longer ‘pops’ – because the eye works to hold them all together.

Consider the a typical SALE flyers we’ve all seen. It’s typical to make half the type on the flyer red, to make it really grab attention. But have you ever noticed that by the time there is that much red type on the page, it no longer shouts the same way as it would if they had used mostly black, with just a big red headline? The eye notices what is different, and it notices contrast… so too much red makes it more benign than just a little bit of red.

Another example is a catalog spread I recently critiqued, where the product that was being shown off was pink – and the background of the spread was very carefully chosen to be the same pink. Then on the insets, the tablecloths were pink too. The entire spread became a sea of pink, and the key product disappeared on the page.

So to show off a product’s color, you can’t use more of the same color, because it becomes anticlimactic – they eye adjusts to the color and the merchandise disappears in more of the same color. To get drama or at least that little ‘ziingg’ you want, you need to consider another color strategy.

Perhaps it would be the concept of complementary colors (opposite each other on the ‘color wheel’), or warm versus cool colors, or something that makes the product really pop with excitement on the page.

If you’ve never seen a color wheel to understand complementary colors, here are a few examples:
Color                  Its complement
RED                    GREEN
BLUE                  ORANGE
YELLOW            VIOLET
MAGENTA         LIME GREEN (YELLOW-GREEN)
PURE CYAN      REDDISH ORANGE

In the case described with the pink items, it might mean picking up a pale green for the background, or keeping the background white, or perhaps pale yellow (the pink is cool, the yellow is warm) – and shoot one item on a pale green cloth, shoot another element on pale yellow… another on white… you get the picture. The main product shines by its difference.

The Case of the Disappearing Headline!

Another phenomenon that is important to understand about color is how equal ‘values’ work with, or against, each other. If the value, or strength, of a color is on your page, and another color type is placed in that color area that is the same value, the type ‘disappears’. A prime example of this is when you see someone put ‘Christmas green’ type on a ‘Christmas red’ background. The colors ‘bounce’ against each other, but the type is impossible to read comfortably.

The only exception to this is in a full strength yellow, which is not an impossible background when it comes to reading type. However it CAN be an unpleasant one if too bright.

I just saw a catalog with a dark blue background and red type within the block of color – nearly impossible to read. Now, you would think that common sense would take over and if they artist didn’t notice this, someone looking at proofs would have put the brakes on -- but often, catalog writers and mangers don’t question the color judgment of the artist.

This disappearing type phenomenon happens with lighter type and backgrounds also. Again, contrast is your best friend in creating legibility and getting attention.

By this example you can see that you must be prepared to direct designers to change color when type can’t be read. Too few have the understanding of legibility and comprehension to resist reversing type out or choosing colors like that.

Color and your Market:

The color palette you choose for your catalog is most successful when it’s driven by the psychographic profile of the recipient (psychographics being the next level in from demographics – we’re talking about social attitudes, affinities, and other personal characteristics). But it also has to do with the attitude and mission of the catalog itself, and about making your product look its best.

For example, most would think of a primary bright color palette (primary red, blue and yellow) as a great kid’s catalog palette. However, referring to the first part of this article, when all the items in the catalog are colors like that, using those bright colors in large solids distracts from how colorful the merchandise is. It’s like going into a room with red walls, wearing a red sweater. In the white room, you stood out. In the red room, you disappear.

So brightly colored toys among a primary color palette look kind of – ordinary. Not a load of fun, which is what you want toys to look like.

A few years ago, when I did a kid’s wear catalog that had lots of brightly colored clothing, I used brights ONLY for small accents, and some of the darker brights as subhead type, in strong, easy to read font styles. But the backgrounds were white for the most part, and a pale gold hardwood floor that we used as our set to photoshoot. The clothing looked brilliant!

Colors can reflect mood. Colors like pale blue, ivory, peach and pale green are nurturing colors…but ironically, these are difficult for older people (over 60) and many men to see. (There are statistics that say that up to 70% of all men are slightly colorblind, due to genetics. Women don’t need the same gene structure to see color fully, as men do). So if you have a male audience, it’s best to use stronger color for accents such as a small red logo or button that says SALE rather than a pale blue one.
Colors like browns are nice “manly” colors -- but in fact, UPS has spent a fortune convincing people through a branding campaign that brown is good and high VALUE — since studies showed that people’s perception of brown is pedestrian and cheap.

Blue is a nice solid color that works well in financial and other areas including software. The Sharper Image has always used a lot of blue in their presentations because it’s clean, masculine and strong. I’ve used it successfully with the doctor’s market, as well.

Colors like gold are great for catching the eye. That’s why Kodak film boxes are still the ones people look for on the shelves, while the green Fuji film sometimes languishes. “Christmas green” for film just never caught on... And to most people, bright green is not an appealing color in large quantities.

Green tests poor in comprehension for type, but as a logo color, there are exceptions… if you had a gardening service for example, green would signify the business nicely. A dark green is wonderful for financial services. I have control packages for Wine of the Month Club that use green and burgundy as accent colors and tints, and have also used it successfully for real estate for very high-end horse property, with metallic gold accent, to frame beautiful photos of equestrians.

Warm versus cool color

Another characteristic of color is ‘warm’ versus ‘cool’. Again, color being relative, cool palettes tend to be blues, greens, brown and taupe… while warm palettes tend toward reds, yellows, golds, warm greens like lime, and mauve. At one point, we tested a warm palette versus a cool palette in a direct mail piece… and the “warmer” palette won. But to balance the piece and to add that special contrast I talked about earlier, we also tempered it with some cool dark blue heads, etc. so that the balance visually was still appealing. The cool colors made the warm colors pop, attracting the eye to where we wanted them to look.

Legibility and comprehension

As mentioned earlier in this article, color needs to be handled carefully when type is set on top of it.

There are colors that encourage reading of long blocks of type, and those that discourage it. For example, NO body copy should be in any color but BLACK. Extensive studies have proven that body copy set in colors will reduce comprehension of that message by up to 90% if it’s a sans serif font. That means that the reader only “gets” 10% of what he/she would have gotten if the type were in black on a white background.

Type set in black on a medium colored background takes comprehension down substantially too -- at least 40%. Therefore, to get maximum readership (and response) the rule is no reversed type, and no colored type... Except for strong dark colors for heads or subheads … and NO reversing type out of photos, or overprinting type over photos, which can also drop comprehension up to 90%. Again, this is common sense – when you, yourself see type overprinting a photo, you notice your eye bouncing around, trying to distinguish the message and the photo. This distraction is a death knell for response.

A big disappointment this year was seeing the newly redesigned Spiegel catalog and finding page after page of type reversed out of light and pastel colors. Of course, it can barely be read. Statistically sales would be a fraction of what they could expect with legible copy. It would have been such an easy judgment call to print the type black over the pale backgrounds. If reversing type out is part of your brand standards, you need to rethink those standards, get them reviewed by an expert in comprehension, and develop some guidelines that any production artist and designer can follow to make your catalog read well.

Often, designers resist rules that will influence their layout. Yet one of the best-known “crutches” for an artist who can’t devise a real concept is to reverse type out. To make it look ‘arty’. It’s the nature of the ‘creative’ being. However, many dedicated designers will embrace this information and can be convinced that the better outcome is worth the change in creative thinking.

A final suggestion about color and consistency

Use color so that it supports the products in your catalog, rather than detracting from the products. Keep your catalog consistent from spread to spread using a palette of color treatments to hold it together, but also keep it different enough from spread to spread that people feel like they are seeing something new, as they page through your catalog. This is the very essence of marketing-driven catalog design.

Become educated about how color and typography increase comprehension in your catalog and advertising, through an article called “Communicating, or just making pretty shapes”, by Colin Whieldon of the Australian News Bureau. His 9-year research study on the way people read, and what makes them comprehend a written message, (and what makes them turn away or not comprehend it) is absolutely in line with every test I’ve ever been part of.

The bottom line is, like everything in direct marketing, some solid education and a lot of common sense goes a long way toward creating your next breakthough. I encourage you to rethink color as it’s used in your catalogs, direct mail and other advertising, and discover what a powerful tool color use can be.