Advanced Color Techniques (Part 2)

In our last post, we covered some of the advanced color techniques designers use to capture attention and influence how people consume information. This follow-up highlights two more ways to use color like a pro. Design for the specific medium you’re using, and leverage color to create a distinct brand identity.

Consider the Medium

Medium is paramount when it comes to using color in design. Colors that look stunning on a screen can end up a visual mess in print, and vice versa. Different mediums require different variations in the color properties (hue, saturation, and lightness) of your chosen palette. A classic example of this rule of thumb concerns the saturation, or the “vividness,” of a color.

Highly-saturated colors are incredibly powerful in print. They draw the viewer’s eye to important parts of the design and can appear to jump off the page, making the design more dynamic. However, employing these same saturated colors in web design can be blinding—literally. That’s because bright, intensely saturated colors are actually brighter and more intense when viewed on a screen. Digital displays rely on transillumination to display color (i.e. they display colored light from behind the screen). Print designs, on the other hand, rely on reflected light and provide an excellent canvas for bright, saturated colors.

Use Color to Differentiate Your Brand

There are many rules and best practices to follow in the practical applications of color, but you shouldn’t let these limit your creativity when it comes to choosing a color palette for your organization’s branding. Instead, use your organization’s mission and culture to guide you as you build a unique visual identity through color, and then apply best practices to refine your choices.

Our own brand update and website revamp make an excellent case study of this philosophy put into practice. Although there are typical color palettes used within every industry, the Diace Designs ethos is to buck the trend. As a creative agency, we strive to produce work that is unexpected. For that reason, we knew that a “typical” design agency website would never be an authentic representation of our brand. So we ditched the black, red, and burnt orange color palette that has become synonymous with our industry and instead chose charcoal and teal to distinguish our site from the plethora of others on the web.

This two-part series on advanced color techniques gives you a bit of insight into how to leverage color in your branding and designs. If you’d rather have an expert team of creatives do the work for you, tag us in.

About Kara Franco
Kara writes copy that speaks. She has a knack for creating clear, compelling messages without wasting words. She is passionate about digital marketing and believes that copy is the cornerstone of user experience.

Copywriter + Content Strategist
Kara@diacedesigns.com