A Resolution for Marketers: Leave Color Selection to Your Graphic Designer
Leave color selection to your graphic designer.
Artists, psychologists, and florists agree. Color has the ability to communicate and affect our emotions. And if you’ve ever felt blue, been tickled pink, or grown so angry you were seeing red I’m certain you’ll agree. Color communication can be more primitive and powerful than any verbal or written language.
With such a subtle and effective communication tool, co-opting the power of color to enhance their marketing message can be irresistible to marketers. Color can add excitement to your marketing efforts and identity to your brand. And by selecting just the right colors you can convey the ideal attributes to your marketing message.
Red is a classic choice to color any company, product or service that is grounded, dominant and forceful. Yellow can convey a homey feeling of warmth and comfort. Incorporating green into the identity of a company can indicate social responsibility and cultural diversity. Making blue central to a brand communicates the exchange of insightful and creative viewpoints. While the use of purple communicates implies innovation and out-of-the-box thinking.
The opportunities for color selection are endless. But choosing an appealing color scheme is not tantamount to developing an effective marketing strategy. Woo hoo! Round up the marketing team and grab the color palate. You’ll quickly be off on a color pick-a-thon pursuing “greener blues, but not too turquoisey, no maybe red, more red, but not red-red … ” As a marketer your input, feedback, and critique are invaluable in the creative process. But leave the nuance of color selection to the expertise of a graphic designer trained in color theory.
The truth of the matter is, color perception is nothing more than a visual sensation that involves three elements – a light source, an object, and a viewer. Objects derive their color by absorbing certain wavelengths of lights while reflecting other wavelengths back to your eyes. Your eyes contain two types of light receptors, rods, and cones. The cones are sensitive to the red, green or blue light of the visible spectrum and are responsible for perceiving color. Your brain receives signals from the cones, processes them, and then evokes the sensation of color.
Furthermore, color perception varies from person to person and can be influenced by a number of variables including the light source, surrounding colors, your mood, and variations in your own visual system. A number of people have color-deficient vision or color-blindness – which may result from one type of cone missing or a defect that affects color analysis in the brain. The most common form is the inability to distinguish between reds and greens. The second most common form of color-deficient vision affects individuals who suffer from a condition commonly known as poor taste.
Not everyone can make informed judgments about color choice. Your eyes, no matter how well trained can be overwhelmed by the many variables that contribute to color perception. Color is a complex subject that can, and should, be studied in great depth. In fact, you can even earn a college degree in color science. So leave choices requiring color expertise to the experts. Even the colors black and white can be powerful and effective in the hands of a well-trained graphic designer.
