Working With A Limited Color Palette

By Roger C. Parker

Ever notice how some organizations look so professional in print, while others appear so amateurish?

Color has a lot to do with it. Color choices play a major role in the success of your publications and the image your organization projects. Creating effective communications involves choosing a limited number of the right colors and consistently using them in the right way.

Let's break down these concepts:

Limited number: The best publications tend to be those that emphasize a few key colors for headlines, backgrounds, and major graphic elements (accents, etc.). Color photographs, of course, should include millions of different colors. But the majority of your communications should use just a few key colors.

Best colors: Whether considered individually or in combination with each other, colors project certain images and evoke certain emotional responses. It's up to you to choose colors that are compatible with the image you want to communicate. Dark grays and dark blues, for example, project richness and strength, red usually indicates caution or danger, while bright greens and yellows project a fresh, youthful, "summer" image.

Consistency: Once you have chosen the colors appropriate to the image you want to project, you should use them consistently throughout all your communications. Just as your handwritten signature unifies all your checks, all your print communications - including your correspondence, brochures, newsletters, training materials, and Web site — should consistently reflect the same color choices.

In the right way: Color succeeds when it is used with restraint, to perform specific functions. Color fails when it is added indiscriminately as decoration or entertainment, to rescue an otherwise boring publication. Color works best when it serves a purpose: arousing a specific emotional response, creating a unique image that separates your message from your competitor's, or providing selective emphasis. On the other hand, color used indiscriminately simply confuses your audience.

What is a palette?

A palette is a carefully chosen collection of three to (approximately) six unique and precisely defined colors that you use consistently throughout your printed communications. Your color palette should remain consistent between projects and printing technologies for long periods of time. You should use the same colors on projects intended for mass duplication (commercially printed brochures and annual reports, etc.) and for limited-quantity projects using an office color printer (flyers, press releases, departmental newsletters, etc.).

The colors you choose for your palette should harmoniously relate to each other. You don't want colors that will compete or conflict with each other. Yet, there should be enough differences (or contrast) between the various colors for you to clearly separate foreground from background text, distinguish graphic elements, and provide selective emphasis where desired.

A specific color's number, rather than the color's appearance on your monitor, should identify each of the colors in your palette. These numbers permit you to consistently identify and communicate the precise shades and tones desired. These numbers also eliminate (or reduce) problems caused by discrepancies between the colors displayed on your computer monitor and the colors created on the printing press or on your office color copier. A color's number indicates its precise mixture of the four CMYK inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) that, when mixed together on a sheet of paper, create that unique color.

Each unique color has its own characteristics, the primary ones being hue, saturation, and brightness.

Hue refers to the subjective name we give various colors; for example, "red," "midnight blue," or "Astral Silver" (for you BMW lovers out there).

Saturation refers to the intensity, or brightness, of a color.

Brightness refers to the color's shade (lightness or darkness). Brightness is determined by whether (or how much) white has been added (that lightens the color). Darkness is determined by whether (or how much) black has been added (that darkens the color).

There are various color-matching schemes available that help you accurately define and consistently use the same colors. The most popular is the PANTONE® Color Matching System. By selecting colors from the PANTONE® Color Matching System books available from several sources, and entering the numbers that make up each color into your software program, you can achieve consistent results, whether your publication is printed in your office or at a commercial printer.

The role of technology when choosing colors

When choosing a color palette, it's important that you take the capabilities of your office color printer into account.

Ink-jet, thermal, and laser color printers differ in their ability to create different colors. Although most office printers do a good job of reproducing fully saturated colors (for example, blue, yellow, and green used at full strength), they are often less successful when it comes to reproducing shades, or tints, of the various colors (20% blue, 30% green, etc).

Likewise, depending on the printer technology you're using, you may find that primary colors (like red, blue, and green) tend to reproduce better than intermediate colors (like purple or turquoise). Many color printers also have difficulty with certain shades of gray.

The problem is that many printers create intermediate colors by approximating colors and placing adjacent dots of color together to fool the reader's eyes into "seeing" the desired colors. Your printer might create various shades of orange, for example, by placing yellow dots next to red dots. The technical term for this is dithering.

Although dithering isn't noticeable in photographs, it becomes extremely noticeable when used for fills (solid backgrounds) or for heavy, bold headline text.

Before committing to a specific color palette, always test the ability of your color printer to reproduce each of the colors you intend to use in your palette.

Where do palettes come from?

Palettes are based on the position of the colors in the color wheel. The color wheel is a widely accepted way of visually displaying the various hues, or colors, available. The relationship of the colors on the color wheel determines whether the colors will harmonize, or compete, with each other. Click here to download a color specimen file that you can use to test your color printer's capabilities. This file is quite large, it could take up to 10 minutes on a 56.6 modem.

When choosing the appropriate colors for your own palette, the trick is to let one color dominate and reserve its "partner" color for accents only. Using color combinations at full-saturation levels can have an overwhelming effect, so it's best to choose a tint, or percentage, of the true color, or tone down both colors.

Here are some of the terms used to define colors and relationships on the color wheel:

Complementary colors lie directly across from each other and create maximum contrast.

Contrasting colors are separated by three segments on the color wheel.

Analogous colors (also called harmonious colors) are separated by one segment of the color wheel. Because they are located so close to each other, they harmonize with each other.

Monochromatic colors are varying tints of a single hue (such as light green, true green, and dark green). Using these shades of colors, in addition to "pure" colors, allows you to broaden your choices within a single color selection.

Primary colors refer to red, blue and yellow and form a triangle with each other.

Secondary colors are located midway between the primary colors.

To make sure your palette is up to date with current color trends, check the industry’s most recent color forecasts; from companies such as The Color Association of the United States (CAUS), The Color Marketing Group or Pantone to ensure your choices are in line with upcoming color trends.

Do not neglect black and grays (shades of black) when choosing your color palette. various shades of gray work very effectively to set off other colors. Remember that colors gain or lose impact depending on surrounding colors. Colors that, by themselves, are muted become stronger when set against a black or gray background. For example, in New England, red stop signs along the side of the road are easier to locate in the summer (when the surrounding trees are green) than in the fall (when they blend in with the surrounding yellow, orange, and red foliage).

Again: Colors gain or lose impact depending on surrounding colors.

Choosing a color palette

Use restraint when choosing colors for your palette. The ideal color palette includes just a few key colors. As you add more colors to your palette, each color becomes less important and the unique, cumulative impact of your palette becomes diluted.

The starting point for choosing a color palette is to refer to the various sample color-palette resources that are available. Often these volumes are organized by the images they project (tranquil, South West, art deco, etc.) and include the CYMK information needed to create the colors.

These samples, of course, should be used as simply the starting point for your exploration of color. Once you have chosen a palette, one that your clients and/or co-workers approve of, you should feel free to subtly modify it. You might want to substitute or fine-tune one or more of the suggested colors.

Always be on the lookout for inspiration. Pay particular attention to multi-color publications (and Web sites) that use just a few carefully chosen colors. When you find a publication with a pleasing color palette, refer to one of the PANTONE® Color Matching books; try to identify the CMYK numbers associated with each color, and try applying the colors to your own work.

Using your color palette

Palettes can exist as both computer files and as printed hard copy. Files containing palettes can be distributed throughout your organization, ensuring consistency between projects and among all users. Consistency can be enhanced by providing everyone with copies of sample documents with call outs identifying the colors used for each element of a page's architecture: headlines, backgrounds, subheads, etc.

Here are some suggestions for making the most of your color palette:

Background versus foreground elements: Most palettes include both light and dark colors. Use pale, light colors for background fills. Use brighter and/or darker colors for foreground text.

Contrast: Avoid equal amounts of the same color on the same page. Let one color become the dominant color, providing a field for other accent colors.

Legibility: When setting type in color, make sure that there is sufficient contrast between the text and its background. The closer the tonal value of the text and its background, the harder it will be to read.

Exercise restraint: The impact a color creates is often inversely proportional to the amount of ink on a page. Often, less is more. A single red mark on a page attracts more attention than the whole page in red.

Concentrate color: Instead of spreading color around on a page, concentrate it in a few key areas.

Conclusion

Like type and layout, color is one of the fundamental building blocks of effective print communications. The appropriate use of color can greatly increase the impact of each individual publication (brochure, newsletter, Web page, etc.). Equally important, the appropriate use of color can help you create a unique and instantly identifiable corporate identity, which will help set your communications apart from those of your competitors.

But, to succeed, colors have to be consistently used in the right way. That's where palettes come in. Palettes make it easy to maintain consistency between documents and between documents created by different individuals. Time invested in choosing the right color palette is as important as time spent in choosing a typeface (or typefaces) for all your organization's communications.