Use of Color in Design, Part 2

by John Eberhard

Last week in part 1, I covered the importance of a color scheme and how you can use the color wheel in selecting colors that will go well together.

After I sent out that article I got an email from friend and associate Jane Millan, owner of Precision Design in San Francisco. She said:

“I might suggest in your next email mentioning the Split-complementary Color Scheme rather than the complementary color scheme (opposites on the wheel) which you mentioned in this email. The Complementary color scheme does have a strong visual contrast, but because they are opposites (thus reflecting the opposite light-wave band) there is a lot of tension in a color scheme like that (hard on the eye if used predominantly).

“The split-complementary color scheme is a variation of the complementary color scheme. In addition to the base color, it uses the two colors adjacent to its complement, rather than its complement.

“This color scheme has the same strong visual contrast as the complementary color scheme, but has less tension. It’s also hard for beginners to mess up.

“Also, I might mention warm vs. cool colors. A great rule of thumb (and one that isn’t generally known or used, but I use it) is that if you use a predominantly warm palette (lots of oranges, yellows, reds) that you use 20% cool (blues, blue-greens). And vice versa. This gives a very dynamic feel to a palette. There are of course bluey-oranges and reddish-blues, etc. so this can be played with a lot, but the 80-20 rule is a great rule of thumb.”

Thanks Jane for that insight.

Here are some excerpts from “Color Harmony” by Hieaki Chijiiwa on the effects achieved by the use of various colors:

“Red: Red is passionate, the color of hearts and flames: it attracts our attention, and actually speeds up the body’s metabolism. Red is popular among the young, and pink in particular is associated with romance. Deep red, on the other hand, looks aristocratic.

“Yellow: Yellow is lively and happy, the color of sunshine and daffodils. Because it is to relentlessly cheerful, we tend to tire of it quickly; an apartment painted in bright yellow would be oppressive, but pale yellow would make it breezy and springlike.

“Green: Green is tranquil and pastoral, the color of trees and grass. Bright green reminds us of spring and fertility, but it’s also the color of mildew, poison, and jealousy. Dark green is an eloquent color, and brings to mind the deep quiet of a pine forest.

“Blue: Blue is the color of the sky and the sea. Like green, it has a calming effect, but it’s also quite powerful – the strongest of the familiar colors after red. Light blue looks young and sporty, but royal or navy blue has a dignified, wealthy air.

“Purple: Purple is a sophisticated color, long associated with royalty. We don’t often see it in nature, so we think of it as an ‘artificial’ color, and find it a bit hard to take. The lighter shades of purple have dominated women’s fashions in recent years.

“Brown: Brown is rich and fertile, like soil, and it’s also sad and wistful, like the leaves in autumn or an October moon. Light brown, tan, and beige give fabrics and housewares a rustic, natural look, while dark brown suggests opulent hardwoods and leather.

“White: White is the color of purity, virginity, innocence and peace, but it’s also associated with hospitals, sterility, and winter. The dichotomy is also seen in white household objects: they either look expensive (like bone china) or disposable (like paper plates).

“Black: Black is the color of night and death, and is often linked with evil (‘black magic’). Its unorthodox appearance has made it popular with artists, but it’s also associated with wealth and elegance (black household items tend to look expensive).

“Warm Colors: The hues from red to yellow, including orange, pink, brown and burgundy, are called warm colors. In fact, the wavelength of red light is very close to that of infrared radiation, which transmits heat. Warm colors are bright, splashy, and aggressive, like the molten lava flowing from this crater. More than any other colors, they attract the eye and excite our emotions.

“Cool Colors: The hues from green to violet, including blue and all the shades of gray, are known as cool colors – perhaps because they remind us of snow and ice, as in this photograph of a summer cruise to Alaska. Cool colors have exactly the opposite effect as warm colors: they slow down the body’s metabolism, and are even used in hospitals to calm manic patients.

“Light Colors: Light shades of any color look soft and ethereal, like cotton candy or fleecy clouds floating in the summer sky. The hue is relatively unimportant: even shades of orange and purple have a gossamer, fairy-tale quality.

“Dark Colors: Black and other dark shades feel heavy, like rain clouds dense with moisture. Black, in particular, seems as strong and as solid as the cast-iron boiler of this old-fashioned locomotive. Dark red, dark purple, dark green and dark blue are the colors most often associated with royalty.

“Vivid Colors: All vivid colors have powerful personalities. Red stands out (looking at all the red in this photograph is like listening to headphones at full volume), but blue and yellow are also vivid, and paradoxically, so are black and white. However, when you combine two or more vivid colors, the result is cacophony – too many voices shouting at once.”

I strongly recommend the “Color Harmony” book.

Good luck with your color scheme selection.

 

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Use of Color in Design

by John Eberhard

 

Color and the selection of colors in the development of a color scheme is one of the most vital elements to use properly in graphic design, and is one area where non-professionals are usually not well trained.

 

Although the use of color is very much subject to opinion, you might be surprised to know that there is a considerable technology of the use of color. And if you follow the general rules, you will usually have a color scheme that is integrated and aesthetic, and if you violate the rules, you can end up with a color scheme that is disjointed and hideous.

 

The first thing to know about color and color schemes is the use of the color wheel. I have scanned and included here a copy of a simple color wheel from the book “Color Harmony” by Hieaki Chijiiwa, which I recommend.            

 

When you’re deciding on colors for a color scheme for a web site, a promo piece, a direct mail piece, an ad, or a page or spread in a magazine, you want to keep it simple. You should have no more than two dominant colors (not including black and white) in that web site, promo piece, ad, spread or whatever. When I say “dominant colors” I mean the colors that are represented in large areas. You can have other colors in small areas (called “spot color”). But for your big, broad areas of the piece, you want only two colors, or at the most three.

 

So how do you select those two colors? Well the color wheel can be your guide. One method I use frequently which works well is to select color opposites on the wheel. Use of color opposites tends to give you an integrated and aesthetic look. By this I mean, mainly: blue-orange, red-green, yellow-purple.

 

I have used blue-orange a lot in designs during my career, usually with great results. Red-green tends to give you a sort of Christmas look, but you can get around this by using subdued shades of either green or red, like dark green or burgundy. Yellow-purple can give you some very striking results and I have seen it used very well. Although technically according to the rules it should not work, I have built color schemes using blue and red and achieved very good results.

 

It’s good to have a near-balance between the two dominant colors, but usually with one color being more dominant.

 

Once you have your dominant colors in there, you can start adding some spot colors to make your design more alive. For example, if you are working with a blue-orange color scheme, you should figure out a way to bring in some small areas of yellow or red. This makes the design more alive. But don’t make these other colors dominant or you could end up with a mess. For example, you would not want to make a design with equal parts of blue, red and yellow. I’ve seen it done and it is not pretty.

 

I advise spending a little time looking at some web sites, promo pieces, advertisements, magazine spreads, etc., to see how they use color and how they put their color schemes together. You will see some that are hideous and garish in their use of color, and some that are works of art.

 

“Saturated colors” are the pure color without adding black or white. The colors shown in the color wheel above are saturated colors. “Shades” are when you add black to the saturated color to get a darker result. “Tints” are when you add white to get a lighter color. Saturated colors tend to make your design feel brighter and more alive, and more masculine. Tints, i.e. pastels, tend to give a more feminine feel. Darker tints make it feel heavy.

 

Next week I’ll cover a bit about what each of the colors and color types communicates.

 

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The Call To Action

by John Eberhard                                                                                                            

One of the most vital aspects of any ad, promo piece, promotional email or web site is called the “call to action.” And for many business people, it is probably one of the least understood.

The call to action is the thing that comes at the end of your ad, promo piece, web page, or promotional email, and should be included in all website marketing. It is where you tell the person what you want him to do. This is where you tell him to buy the product now, to fill out the form, or to pick up the phone and call.

You might think that it is obvious at the end of the ad or web page or promo piece that the person should do what you have in mind. Not so. You have to tell them convincingly what you want them to do. Or let’s put it this way: if you tell them convincingly what you want them to do, your percentage of people that do so will increase dramatically.

I remember working with a guy once who was relatively new to marketing. I looked at the first ad he designed and I realized it had no call to action on it. I tactfully explained what a call to action was, and the ad got modified to include one.

So your call to action tells people what to do. But there is another important element to a call to action, and I notice that some business owners instinctively get this and with others I have to explain it. And that is the offer.

The call to action is where you incorporate your offer. By that I mean that you have to offer them something to sweeten the pot a little bit, to heighten the reader’s interest and get him to take action now, rather than moving on.

With promotions where you are trying to get the person to buy right now, usually with lower ticket items, your offer could be some sort of discount or buy-now, or an add-on that the person gets for free when they buy. Often you can come up with an add-on that adds significant perceived value, but is not that expensive in relation to the price of the item. I think that in the current economy it is more important than ever to come up with an offer that will increase the percentage that buy now.

With higher ticket items, you usually are in the business of lead generation, meaning that you are trying to get the person to respond and give you his contact information so that one of your salespersons can contact and sell him.

So with lead generation, it is helpful to give him an added reason to respond. So you offer him something, usually for free. Like a newsletter subscription, or a free report or white paper, a product demo, or whatever. You want to make sure that your offer is related as directly as possible to the topic of the product or service you are offering. For instance, if you offer a free white paper, it should be on a topic that is directly related to your product or service. That way the people who respond will be much more likely to be qualified prospects, because otherwise they wouldn’t be interested in the white paper.

I have written another article on hard and soft offers, and it is important to understand those. Over the 21 years that I have been involved in marketing, I have found special offers to be very helpful in terms of increasing the percentage of response.

Over the next week, check out the ads or promotional material you see and notice the call to action. Notice if the marketer included any kind of special offer to heighten your interest and get you to respond now. Notice how effective each one was for you. This will help you in crafting your own effective call to action.

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Build Your Own Facebook

by John Eberhard

Building your own social networking website with advanced functionality such as the ability to invite friends and have a friend network, having users each have a profile page and upload images and videos for others to see, may have been a pretty daunting idea in the past. Programming for building such a site would have run into the thousands or tens of thousands.

But there is an emerging trend of companies building complex sites and then offering them as off-the-shelf site templates that you can use. The functionality is built right into the site already. All you have to do is customize the site with your own name and graphics and look.

One such new solution being offered is phpFox, which offers a Facebook-like product that they sell for an inexpensive one-time fee. The software allows you to do the following with your site:

• People sign up and become members
• They have a profile page listing information about them
• They can invite others to become their friends
• An activity feed that shows the status updates of all your friends
• Creating custom user groups and charging fees for membership if you want
• Notices for events
• Instant messaging between members
• Posting images, videos or music
• A marketplace where users can list things for sale
• Create ad campaigns that target everyone or specific groups or demographics

In other words, you can set up a site that is essentially just like Facebook. So why would you want to do that? Well you’re not going to try to go head to head competing with Facebook (if you’re smart) because they are well established and are currently the top social media site in terms of traffic. That would be like trying to compete with Amazon or eBay. Not going to happen.

But what you could do with such a system is to set up a specialized site that is a social network for some specialized group or demographic, like computer consultants, or chiropractors, or dentists, or computer gamers, or classic car enthusiasts, or photographers, or sports fans, or people from a certain city.

You could monetize your site by having advertising (like Facebook does in the right hand column) or charging for memberships.

Of course you have to bear in mind that just putting up such a site would usually not result, just by itself, in millions of people coming to it. You’d still have to work out how to market the site and drive people to it.

But the point is that the availability of inexpensive software like this with all this advanced functionality, makes it possible for you to put up your own social networking site. And if you have a specific niche in mind, a certain group or demographic that all share a certain common interest, and there isn’t already a social networking site like this in that niche, it might be just the ticket.

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Handling the Local Angle

by John Eberhard

One of the issues that many companies have to deal with when they are laying out a website marketing strategy, is the issue of geography. Where is the business located? And where does it do business? Is it a local business servicing people in one metro area? Is it a business that does business in one entire state? Regional? National? International?

Many of the online marketing actions you can take are NOT limited in their geography. In other words, they get the word out nationally or internationally. So if your business is a local restaurant or home improvement company, servicing people only in a small area, those strategies aren’t necessarily the best for you.

For example, I was recently approached by a firm that wanted to target prospects in southern California. But they wanted to do search engine optimization and link building to get their site ranking high in the search engines. This is all well and good. But I was envisioning where this was going to go, and even if we clearly stated on the web site that we service people only in southern California, I could see getting lots of leads from out of the area. I could even see getting only a minority of the leads from the target area.

You can always target keywords that include the name of your location, but this only works if there is some decent traffic associated with those localized keywords.

Google has recently announced a new feature on search called “Nearby.” If you go to the main Google search page, then type in some search, right near the top there will appear a link for “Show options.” Click on this and a column will appear on the left. A little ways down the page it will say “All results” in black and “Nearby” underlined in blue. If you click on “Nearby” then all the results will be geographically nearby.

This is a nifty feature that perhaps Google should have offered a long time ago. But it’s sort of hard to find. So for the time being until this feature becomes easier to find and more widely used, Google’s main search results are not local.

So let’s talk about the various website marketing methods and whether or not they can be used to target locally.

1. Search Engine Optimization: Doing SEO on a site is designed to help with getting the site to rank well in the search engines for certain keywords. So unless you have some keywords that include names of cities or towns near you, and those keywords have some decent traffic, doing SEO does not allow you to target geographically.

1. Blogging: Having a blog, posting to it regularly, and including links within your post going to various pages in your site, is a great way to generate traffic to the blog, and also builds up links to your site. And sending a notification to the blog search engines after each post is what drives traffic. But once again unless you are including the name of your location in your blog posts (in the headlines, links etc.) you will be attracting visitors from all over.

1. Optimized Press Releases: Sending out press releases optimized with your target keywords is a great way to build quality links to your web site. My thought on press releases is that they generate some traffic, but it is more of a method of building links. So I think it does not matter so much if the business is local.

1.  Article Marketing: Submitting articles to article directories, also called content hubs, remains one of the best ways to build up quantity links to your website. But again, unless you are sprinkling the name of your location throughout the article, you will tend to get readers from all over. But again this is mainly a link building action, so my thought is that this works equally well for local businesses, because we’re mainly looking to create links.

1. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC): Pay per click advertising with Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Ad Center allows you to exactly target where your ads will appear. So if you only do business in Glendale, Pasadena and Burbank, California, then you can set it up so that only people living in those cities will see your ads. They will not appear to people searching in Florida. You can pick the whole US, individual states, or other countries. So for a local business that only does business in a certain geographical area, PPC is the best way to drive a lot of traffic that is restricted to one geographical area or zone. As I have mentioned in other articles, PPC is not a good fit for every type of business, because the cost can make it not viable for low ticket items (under $100). But if you selling a high ticket item, it’s usually a great fit.

So in summary, for the local business, pay per click advertising is often the best fit in terms of driving local visitors to your site and generating local leads. That may change as Google makes their “Nearby” feature more prominent and it becomes more widely used. But for now, PPC is the best tool for targeting the local customer.

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