Color packs a powerful emotional punch. Think of autumn foliage ... the blue sky ... red lips ... the shaded hues of a peach ... an emerald ... a waffle ... the little black dress. (The punch can be negative, too – a splash of blood, a rotten vegetable.)
Of course you want to harness the emotional power of color in your marketing communications, but which colors or color combinations are the right ones for your message?
Most big companies have made corporate colors part of their style guide. (Check out the websites of the Fortune 100: how many of them have settled on blue and gray?) The rest of us have more freedom, but that means we have to make choices. Our choices may be guided by color theory (how color works), cultural associations with particular colors, color trends or fads ... and probably by some mix of all three.
Color theory
For thousands of years, artists have made color choices based on their feelings and their observations of the world. At some point, people started thinking about it, and Color Theory was born. Aristotle theorized that white and black were the ‘primary’ colors, out of which all other colors were made.
Isaac Newton was the father of modern color theory, demonstrating that white light could be broken down into seven ‘primary’ colors with a prism. The phenomenon was well-known, but people had thought the colors were inside the glass. Newton sent the spectrum back through a second prism, reconstituting the white light and proving that the light was the source of the colors. This demolished Aristotle’s theory and got a lot of people upset.
Newton also created the first color wheel, a concept which persists to this day. Our graphic designers studied color wheels so that you won’t have to, but the underlying idea is important: colors on opposite sides of the wheel – such as red and green – are complementary. If you stare at a red image long enough to fatigue one set of cones in your retina, and then look at a white sheet of paper, you’ll see the same image in green.
Two complementary colors side by side will contrast very sharply. Basic color theory holds that complementary colors make up a harmonious ‘color scheme’, although you may not necessarily agree.
Other color concepts include hue (what the color is); lightness or value (the amount of light reflected); chroma (the intensity or saturation of the color); shade (a color mixed with black); tint (a color mixed with white); and tone (a color mixed with gray).
Color contrast
Another basic fact about colors is that they are defined by the field that surrounds them. Two blocks of color which are technically the ‘same’ in terms of printer ink or computer pixels will look quite different when surrounded by different colors.
In the early 20th century, Bauhaus teacher and famed color theorist Johannes Itten proposed seven basic categories of color contrast:
- hue (two different colors),
- light and dark values,
- cool and warm colors (cool recedes, warm comes forward),
- complementary (color wheel opposites),
- simultaneous (where the boundaries vibrate, such as red next to green),
- saturation (different chroma of the same color), and
- extension (relative size of one color to another).
The list is suggestive of the great number of choices you have at your disposal when working with color. Variations in one or more of these color contrasts can create very different designs, that evoke very different feelings in the viewer.
Color associations
Itten said, “Colors are forces, radiant energies that affect us positively or negatively, whether we are aware of it or not”. And virtually everybody who writes about color is moved to list associations of particular colors with various feelings or qualities (although the lists tend to differ from writer to writer and culture to culture).
Certainly most people accept the distinction between cool colors (green, blue) and warm colors (red, orange). In fact, Itten cites an experiment where people were put into a red-orange room or a blue-green room, and the rooms were gradually cooled down. The people were asked to say when they felt cold; they felt cold at 59º in the blue-green room, and at 52º in the red-orange room.
Red is considered a very passionate, energetic color, associated with desire, blood and danger. Yellow is generally perceived as a cheerful, happy color. It is also the most fatiguing color because it is so bright; it’s been observed that babies tend to cry more in yellow rooms.
Pink on the other hand has been found to calm aggression. There was a brief vogue of painting municipal drunk tanks pink, to cut down on aggressive behavior; however, once the inmates acclimated to the color, their aggressiveness returned.
Blue may be tranquil and soothing, or cool and intellectual. Black is the most serious color, being associated with power, elegance, formality and death. For centuries, purple was associated with royalty, primarily because purple dye was so expensive that only kings and queens could afford it: in the Roman Empire, a pound of royal purple dye required four million mollusks.
White in our culture is associated with purity and virginity, which is why the bride wears it, but she wouldn’t in China, where white is the color of mourning. J.L. Morton (at www.colormatters.com) refers us to the 1434 portrait by Jan Van Eyck of “Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride”: the bride is wearing green, a symbol of fertility for the Dutch (as was the mythical Green Man for the Celts).
Bruce MacEvoy (at www.handprint.com) comments that “there simply are no consistent color meanings in world art” and continues, “Cultural expectations and experience play a large role in a viewer’s response. This is a good thing: it means the symbolic power of color is continually renewing itself.”
Next issue: Mysteries of Color Production
For information on how we can help you with your next marketing program, contact us at Sullivan Creative.
Sullivan Creative respects your privacy. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, e-mail team@sullivancr.com, and insert the word "Remove" in the subject line of your e-mail.
Color at
Sullivan Creative
We asked Chuck Provancher, Senior Art Director; Carol Fusaro, Vice President & Account Manager; and Pam Sullivan, President, Owner & Creative Director, for their thoughts about color.
How would you describe Sullivan Creative’s approach to color?
Chuck: We use a lot of it! We never just go with one color as a theme. I’ve seen other companies design websites where everything is varying shades of green, or varying shades of blue. We’ll always have an accent color in there to offset that, because one color by itself is kind of like one hand clapping. And if possible we use a lot more than two.
Pam: We’re known in the industry as a place that uses a lot of color, whether they’re in a softer or brighter palette. We use the primary colors a lot, the reds, yellows, blues and greens; we use purple a lot. Our office is really colorful, and people walk in and they’re really energized. Color is energy. Color makes people happy.
Carol: I think we really do a good job of getting a sense from our clients of how to characterize them in color. We look at a palette of colors, we try to associate the mission of our clients’ businesses with the colors. If it’s a health organization, say, or a hospital we’ll go with a softer color palette. If it’s a retail operation or store, we’re looking at more dynamic colors.
Do you have a favorite color or colors?
Carol: I’m really partial to blues and yellows, and orange.
Chuck: I like a lot of different colors; I especially like how colors work together. I like blue, for example, but too much blue would bug me, so I’d combine blue with a nice green, or a nice violet.
Pam: It depends on the season. Right now in the fall I’m looking out the window and I see beautiful oranges and red oranges. In the summer, nothing strikes me more than a beautiful red flower in the garden
Do you associate colors with particular emotions or feelings?
Chuck: I certainly associate yellow with happiness, and optimism and warmth. Red with excitement, green with nature and kind of a pleasing feeling. Blue is a tricky one. I associate it with calmness, but the right tone of blue, the right shade can have a certain sense of excitement too.
Pam: Some blues I think of as being cool or cold, but you can add a little yellow to them and warm them up. I like bright colors because they have a lot of life to them, and they energize you.
Carol: Red to me means excitement. Green I always associate with nature, the earth, the environment, along with browns. Purple is a soothing color for me.
In the field of marketing communications, have you noticed color trends over the years?
Carol: Well, I’m not a designer. Sometimes a color comes up, like, teal – “Oh, well, that’s the 1980’s!” I personally don’t see colors as being trendy. I look at whether the color suits the mission of the business or organization.
Pam: At the height of the big Internet and high tech thing you saw all that mustard-colored green, mustard-colored gold and navy blue with a lot of black in it. And all these new high-tech companies had the same palette. It was the younger kids coming out of art school, they dressed that way and everything they produced looked that way. And then it ran its course.
Chuck: In the early to mid-90’s , there was a real trend in “jewel tones”: dark reds, dark blues, dark green, and nature-related imagery. Then during the dot-com era it went just the opposite, into neon green and neon orange and these colors that were not a part of nature. Today, I’m seeing a lot of muted colors like slate blue and seafoam greens.
