Most people have experienced falling in love with a paint color only to be appalled by the same color when seeing it covering an entire wall or room.

Color is not just a tricky thing, it is the trickest thing. Everyone views color differently to varying degrees.  I seem to remember a dispute my parents had about painting over the “barn red”, “no, brown!” paint color of our new house. Additionally, different print environments, materials or digital displays will produce different colors. Usually the difference is slight.

I recently got the chance to explore color values in a new way by painting a series of oversized Pantone chips on small canvases. Mixing acrylic paints with the goal of matching actual Pantone colors just by eye was a fun challenge. And it seems the end result for most of the colors was a pretty close match.

The quality of the paint, canvas, and natural lighting exert an enormous influence in how these colors are perceived. Under some environments, the colors are dead on; on others, they seem off.  Which is “right?” The concept of color accuracy is a crucial, and often unattainable ideal. I’ve heard it described as the “Holy Grail” of our industry.

Here’s yet another complication. In the print world, uncoated paper (your typical bond paper, newsprint, etc.) soaks up ink and therefore has a completely different quality than a coated sheet (a magazine page, for example) which creates a glossy surface upon which the ink “sits.” The result is that glossy paper is more reflective and colors appear lighter.

The photos above demonstrate this. Coated ink swatches are on the left and uncoated swatches are on the right. Exact same ink colors are printed on each, with different results.

Most people are oblivious to the nuances of different production methods. You have to make a conscious choice about looking – a good thing, really, because I think the eye is ultimately very forgiving.  “Mere color,” Wilde said, “unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.”

the source material

The combination of new location, a daily bike commute, and quick daily walks have made Becca and I much more sensitive to the changing seasons this year. Readers of previous posts will remember that leaves are of particular interest to us this fall.

We were especially struck with the incredible richness and range of colors, and Becca had a great idea to use them in our office entry room signage. The concept was to isolate each leaf against a perfectly white background.

three of the fifty-four leaves we used

Although completely natural, the project had the feeling of a design exercise – with the different size, shape, and patterns of each – creating a sense of both diversity and unity that makes the natural world endlessly fascinating. It reminded me of the evolution of typography, how the interplay of form and function propelled countless designers to reinterpret the same essential forms, over and over again.

a close up

Most striking is that the leaves were all gathered within a few blocks of our office. In an urban setting of concrete and cars, it is easy to think of the natural world as something “out there.” Yet, the diversity of the these leaves tells another story; we have only to open our eyes and see.

the finished result

A call out to the person who wrote down “leaf” with a felt pen on a leaf at Maritime Park. Somehow, among the millions – perhaps billions of leaves – we found your message and included it in our project. What are the odds?

As Becca and I establish new routines in our new downtown office space, we’ve been enjoying short walks we complete several times daily.  This summer we were reminded how delightful the change of seasons are in Bellingham – particularly the leaves and sky.

As part of our thinking about local color, we’ve been photographing a specific shot of Whatcom Creek in  Maritime Heritage Park. Every work day, typically around 10:30 we walk there to take our photo. During the next year we will be creating a variety of different projects similar to this to explore the interaction of light and color. Here is our first such project: a slideshow of September’s waterfall photos. We look forward to seeing the colors changing from the shades of green above to gold, orange, and the whites of winter.

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Developing an identity for the Bellingham/Whatcom County Commission Against Domestic Violence raised some challenging questions about design and marketing that we hadn’t encountered before.

The Commission works with a variety of community partners to detect, prevent, and help people recover from domestic violence issues. Their identity needed to reflect the organization’s role of understanding domestic violence in an abstract way (i.e. through statistics) while still being emotionally present in the human impact this issue has on our community.

The balancing act between rational and emotional is inherently tricky, and adding to that challenge was the powerful, extreme nature of domestic violence – a thing which by its nature is usually hidden from view.  In our explorations of the material, suggestions of violence usually came off as maudlin, corny, or voyeuristic where outright depictions were  blisteringly negative – probably the worst thing to show for an organization devoted to stopping violence. Can you draw a picture depicting the absence of domestic violence? Neither can I.

My comfortable little life of art books, typography, cats, and chamber music seemed utterly inadequate for the task at hand. Even my language seemed lacking, even darkly, comically, perverse. This was not a subject you could “take a stab at” or build a “killer app” for.

Divide and conquer, indeed. Our first major step forward was thinking about creating a solid, believable foundation for the brand. Fontfont’s Sanuk seemed a perfect choice. The handwriting based, endoskeleton of Sanuk seemed smart, precise, and slightly feminine to me, and its streamlined look made it look perfectly suited for a government agency.  Used in everything from reports to posters, Sanuk would help create a controlled presence for the organization that would stay fresh and relevant for years to come.

Sanuk, an elegant, versatile type family integrates all of Commission's materials

By itself, Sanuk would be coldly rational… too much so. A collage system would act as ballast to the type, contrasting the fluid precision of the letterforms with a rougher, imperfect, more colorful illustration style. Effects applied consistently to each would impose a coherent look among drastically different photos, helping them read more as symbols instead of actual things.

collage component: intervention

Our content selections were guided by four emotional touch points we identified: control, loss, intervention, and community – with the last concept envisioned as the culminating, positive  step of a sequence.

collage component: community

As a system, these pieces could be combined and recombined in a variety of ways to make covers for reports or other assets, website graphics, or other applications, creating a stable, but adaptable platform the Commission could use in its materials for years to come.

collage application - report cover

Thinking about structure in your marketing materials is about how you decide to use visual relationships to reinforce your message. It means thinking beyond what is being said, and exploring the how.

As always, the process begins with focusing on your message, ideally your one message.  Deciding on a core message is often the biggest challenge, especially if multiple decision makers are involved. However, once you have it, the rest is, in a sense, “just details.”

In the ad above, profitability is the key message; the function of the ad is to help the audience trust the company and the product it sells. Conveying trust is a task well suited to structural thinking, as is evidenced by the language of trust  (e.g. “a solid partnership,” “an upright citizen,” “a stand-up guy,” a “shaky deal”).

I think it’s easier to trust something that’s perfectly centered and perfectly straight, than a crooked something that leans one way or another. That was the reason behind conceiving the middle as a backbone for this ad. It connects the perfect vertical of the man’s weight bearing leg with the copywriting and the frame holding the various logos. I think of these organizational elements as power lines (like power chords), combining the function of support beams, taut string, and a live wire.  Not using them at all creates visual oatmeal, using too many is like a pile of glass shards.  A handful is just right.

Color provides another critical point of connectivity, in this case linking the message with the logo – a relationship reinforced by both elements using the same type set at the same size. Visually, we are prompting the audience to associate profitability with the Fireline brand. Conveying this message verbally and visually makes it more interesting and believable.

A final structural component is the consistent use of spacing between the various elements – depicted above through the lines and squares of equal length.  Building consistency into a design in this fashion subtly communicates a methodical, professional reliability into the message, but I think the real purpose is to be invisible. We don’t want waste the audience’s attention on these details. Their function is always to support – never compete with-  the primary message.

I’ve found that thinking structurally about design has helped us convey messages relating to corporate success, trust, reliability, and strength. However, there are times when a too structured approach ruins a concept by slowly draining the life out of it. The middle ground between too much chaos or order is different for every project or person. As always, the best strategy is to understand how the choices you are making figure into the final product.

A holiday card commissioned by the Port of Bellingham became a little object lesson in design. The assignment was simple enough: use a series of historical photos to convey a message of holiday wishes without using symbolism related to any one religious tradition.

The tricky thing about the project was that there was no clear relationship between the source material and the holiday. The photos were all shot under widely different circumstances during the larger part of a century. In my previous post, I had mentioned how some jobs require a designer to play a secondary role of interpreting but not interfering with the source material. Here the opposite stance was required. The design process would be imposing meaning and coherence on essentially a series of unrelated photos, and then linking those things with something completely separate (the holiday).

After trying a variety of concepts for internal review, I felt that we were approaching a solution. We would impose a universal treatment on the photos – converting all of them to black and white and placing them in identical squares. A wreath would be set in and (of course) be circular, positioned in the exact center of a square layout. This concept uses visual contrast to transform the lack of relationship between the photos and the seasonal message a from a liability to a strength.

Lastly, the design was robust in terms of the revision process, easily allowing for photos to be added, removed or re-cropped to subtly change the message of the card. After one round of revisions, the card design was approved and delivered, and we were ready to start on the next project!

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.
- Paul Klee

Though our eyes can distinguish millions of different shades of colors, our color vocabulary is limited in comparison –  about thirty words in all.  As a species, those  words enter vocabulary at a snail’s pace, using  a sequence that remains much the same from culture to culture.

All languages have words for black and white. Red is always the third color to have a word associated with it, followed by green (or yellow) and then yellow (or green). Blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey follow suit.

There are a few  variances to this general pattern.  One African tribe has no word for green but six for red. The ancient Greeks had no word for blue. There is no Old English word for orange.

Personally, I like the fact that red is always the first color to get a word. This reinforces a notion I have about red, white, and black being the most striking color combination there is.

Source: The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher