Add a little colour to your design

Colour Lovers is a site dedicated to color and its use in design, marketing trends, and art. They have over 160,000 users who post color palettes dissected and extracted from such subjects as crayons, national brand logos, and even fall leaves. They watch market trends of popular color usage in logo, web design, fashion, you name it. They even have a post that shows a side by side comparison of what a color blind person sees next to the original artwork.

Users post patterns and palettes inspired by vintage fabric, masterpieces by famous artists, or just a season of the year. Each provides the RGB number equivalent to be able to easily utilize it yourself. Many of the patterns available for download could be a great start in designing your own personal digital fabric or wallpaper.

It is a wealth of information and inspiration for any designer. Likewise, people in the marketing and advertising industry can learn what colors have been successful for other big name companies when developing their campaign or brand. A great site, worth spending some time exploring.

Effectively using color in marketing

The holiday season is just around the corner. In fact, the Halloween merchandise has been on the shelves for weeks now. In a time when retail spending is down, what tools can you use to boost sales? Think color. Choosing the right color scheme in your store design and marketing material can subconsciously stimulate and attract customer attention.

Jeff Grant from Trio Display offers some great tips on how to effectively use color to design an environment that not only helps you build your brand and promote your product, but also generate more sales.

The Retailer's Guide to Color in Store Design

Color is often underestimated as a marketing tool. That’s right, I said “marketing” tool. Think about it for a second: some of more powerful brand associations you can think of connect through color. UPS: “What Can Brown Do for You?” IBM is “Big Blue.” Home Depot and orange are forever linked.

Coloring Between the Lines

Marketers are merely taking advantage of the fact that we respond strongly to color on a visceral level, reacting and making judgments almost instantly without being aware of it. Here are a couple common associations…

• White: Cleanliness, purity, honesty.
• Red: Vitality, passion, love.
• Blue: Calm, stability, peacefulness.
• Brown: Open, reliable, grounded.
• Orange: Energetic, warm, happy.

Blue vs. Pink

Gender plays a part in color choice. Darker colors or brighter colors seem to appeal more to men than women, while softer or more “ambiguous” colors find a better reception with female clientele. Which particular colors are preferred tend to be tied to culture. It is worth noting that a standard blue is favored by both genders. If your retail space is heavily weighted toward one sex or the other, scheme appropriately.

A wealth of digital photography tutorials

I quite literally Stumbled Upon this website today. Sean T. McHugh on his site, Cambridge in Colour, posts a quite and extensive and comprehensive list of digital photography tutorials. He covers topics from understanding your camera, to Photoshop techniques, to how we perceive color, and many more. Lots of technical data, but written in a way that is easy for users at any level to understand and apply. A great resource!

Here is a little background on Sean:

To provide some background, much of this work was conducted while pursing my PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Cambridge. I have previously conducted undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, also in chemical engineering. My doctoral research focused on understanding reactive flow in multiphase plumes (applications to carbon dioxide sequestration, cloud growth and volcanic eruptions).

As a scientist by training, I am fascinated by the interaction between technological developments and the range of creative options available to photographers. Improvements in sensitivity, ex post facto white balance control and real-time feedback from digital imaging are providing photographers with unprecedented low-light capabilities. Much of this fascination has been channelled into finding unique times, perspectives and techniques for capturing many of these low-light scenes in Cambridge.

As part of the Cambridge University Photographic Society, I conducted student workshops relating to general camera and SLR technique, photographic post-processing and low-light photography. These included participants ranging from those with their first camera, to more seasoned users wishing to refine their techniques. I encourage you to contact me if you would like further information about joining the society.

Color deconstructed

If you are interested in learning more in depth about RGB and color workflow, I have two good resources for you. The first is posted on photoshopessentials.com titled RGB Color and Color Channels Explained. The article breaks down how Photoshop 'sees' color and translates each color in to a number equivalent that represents what our eye perceives as red, blue, or green.

The second is a new self help guide released from Adobe that details the best color workflow in all the new Creative Suite 3 softwares. Kind of a long read, you might want to jump to page 21 if you only use Photoshop. [Via]

These articles should give you a better understanding of how color is created in Photoshop and how to get the best output from your files.

Paint like a master

In Photoshop that is. Or you could use Illustrator, InDesign or GoLive for that matter. Dr. Woohoo, a New Mexico based artist and designer, has built a pretty amazing website called In The Mod. There he has deconstructed several different master works by well known artists to their most basic element; color. You can download the color palette of your favorite artist directly in to Photoshop or Illustrator as a .ASE file and build your own masterpiece. Or perhaps you were so inspired by Cezanne's painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire that you want to decorate your room in the same colors. Well, you can download the palette here. There are also tools that will connect the similarities in color palettes between the painting you are viewing and all the other paintings in their large database. Some fun stuff to play around with or good place to find inspiration for your next design project.

Seeing Red

Since it is Valentine's Day, we thought an analysis of the color red would be appropriate. We all know that the color red can invoke powerful emotions out of the viewer. That is why it is used to represent love and passion. Smart advertisers use this knowledge to incorporate red in to their logos and ad campaigns to grab their audience's attention. This article from the New York Times reviews everything from how we see the color red to how we react to it.

....Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and the author of “Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness.” “If you want to make a point, you make it in red.”

Whatever the primary spur to the evolution of our rose-colored retinas, we, like most other animals with multichromatic vision, have learned to treat red with respect. “In the evolution of languages,” Dr. Humphrey writes, “red is without exception the first color word to enter the vocabulary,” and in some languages it’s the only color word apart from black and white. It’s also the first color that most children learn to name, and that most adults will cite when asked to think of a color, any color.