Color Printing

Adding color to your brochure, flyer, booklet, or business cards will increase the attention your marketing piece can get. Used correctly, colors capture attention, evoke emotions, and highlight important information. Below are some rules for color printing with a few tips on color meanings thrown in between.

Rule 1: Do not mix red and blue colors together.  Both blue letters on a red background or red letters on a blue background or make the reader’s eye tire easily, and they more than likely will not finish skimming your advertisement.

Tip: The color red suggests emotions of aggression and strength, while the color blue means peace, comfort, and loyalty.

Rule 2: Use contrast to make the important information stand out.  For instance, if your background is white with black letters, use a black box with white letters for the call to action.  Avoid too much contrast, though, as this can make reading difficult.

Tip: Black can be an either dramatic, sophisticated, or mournful.  White signifies purity, cleanliness, and simplicity.

Rule 3: Many designers like to use colors that are of the same shade.  For instance, if you want to use a warm color such as an orange, try incorporating other colors from the same family, such as red, brown, or yellow.

Tip: Orange evicts emotions of warmth and excitement, yellow promotes brightness and happiness, and brown is natural and neutral.

Rule 4: Complementary colors are those that are opposite each other on the color wheel.  When using a four color scheme, begin by selecting two complementary colors.  For selecting the next two colors, use another set of complementary colors.  A three color scheme often uses colors that are chosen by creating a triangle on the color wheel.

Tip: Green represents money and nature.  The color purple portrays royalty and spirituality.  Gray can be a cold color but is also distinctive and businesslike.

For a free color wheel, go to the advanced color options in your design program. There are also free color wheels available on many design websites.

When it comes to color printing needs, working with a mega printer can be the smart way to go.  A mega printer is a printer that has at least $500 million in sales volume each year. Mega printers aren’t right for everyone though. Here are some pros and cons to working with a mega printer.

Pros

They have more resources for bigger print jobs. Bigger printers obviously have more workers, which means that each worker is probably assigned to do one thing. That means designers can be hired to only work on designing projects, not to also work the presses half of the time. Mega printers can afford to buy the biggest, nicest printers (which can translate into the fastest printers) and they can buy them in bulk which means that they can turn around printing jobs quickly.

They can be cheaper. One print buyer has been quoted saying that when he has a large project he always goes with a mega printer because he can get a bulk discount.

They could save you on shipping costs. Depending on how many printing plants a mega printer has, there could be one close to your place of business. This means you can have your project printed at one of the closer plants and the delivery charges will be less because your project doesn’t have to travel as far. With rising gas prices, this could be a big factor for a lot of people.

They can give you more options. Mega printers often have more color printing options, more binding options and can do more of your work for you. Some might even design, print and mail your entire project for you.

Cons

The customer service level is below that of a smaller printer. A mega printer has more customer service reps that are trying to get through more customer issues than a smaller printer. You could speak to a different person each time you called, rather than speaking with the same customer service rep at a smaller printer. This means you could spend more time on the phone, re-explaining your problem to a new person each time.

You’re a small fish in a big pond. You are just one of thousands of customers, so you won’t get the preferred service you might get with a smaller printer that really values your business.

More chance for billing errors. More customers mean more invoices. One print buyer reported that he worked with a small printer that was bought out by a mega printer. The billing errors got so ridiculous that he took his business to a smaller printer. How much patience do you have to deal with erroneous paperwork?

Mega printers don’t offer as much flexibility. The buyer has to adhere to constraints for invoicing, inventory and she might have to order her projects in a certain way. Smaller printers can be more flexible because they don’t have as many orders to track. You may have to give up some of your control to reap the benefits of working with a mega printer.

The printed booklet is a staple in the world of advertising when you need to get a lot of information to people. For those whose job centers on them and their knowledge of the field, book printing allows them a chance to let everyone know just how well they know their field.

Booklets are often informational sources dealing with a whole slew of different topics depending on who is writing. When a person picks up a booklet they’re going to be doing so to find out what it has to offer them and what it can teach them more about.

The issue I have is that too many companies aren’t really using the booklet as a form of advertising. They’re treating it like you would a non-fiction book meant only to inform, when a booklet can very easily be a nice venture through the field of graphic design.

Another form of advertising that has a few similar aspects to it is the brochure. Here too is a longer advertisement that usually contains a lot of information. Brochures aren’t as packed in with info as a booklet typically is, and a brochure is going to have more of an emphasis on selling than the average booklet will.

But one thing a brochure shouldn’t have over a booklet is visuals. The full color brochure is the most common style of brochures because of how eye catching it is. You need to take those same visual details and add them to your booklets.

Have images on most of your pages to augment the information given. Have headings with a color backing it to make it stand out from the rest of the text. Find creative ways to highlight certain points, like pulling a paragraph out from the text and adding a colored box around it.

These are all rather basic, easy to implement graphic design details that will greatly improve your booklets. Yes, people are looking at a booklet for information, but they have to be intrigued enough to want to know what that information is.

If you aren’t giving them any worthwhile reason to care about what your booklet has to say than it doesn’t matter how great your information is people will still be hesitant to give it a chance.

No matter how much people might like to believe otherwise, all of us do judge books by their covers some times. If something looks bland and boring I’m often inclined to think that what it has to say is just as bland and boring. It isn’t very fair, no, but I’m still inclined to do it.

Next time you have a booklet made be sure to add in some visual flare. Have fun with it, and come away with a product that people will immediately gravitate towards, and want to flip through.

I’ve talked to people before who had never considered the idea of business cards and graphic design going together. “What is there to design?” they asked with a laugh. “All you have on the card is a name and some contact information. I guess you could say the logo is kind of like graphic design, but that was made long before the business card was.”

Sadly, they have a point. For many people the idea of a custom business card is foreign. All most people ever really see are the standard styles for the business card. I see black lettering on white paper all the time with maybe a colorful logo next to it. But I very rarely see anything other than that.

My question becomes why aren’t people doing more with their cards? Why not have that full color business card that embraces the full color part of it?

I think that the real issue here is that within recent years the rise of home based computer graphic programs has done two things that are quite opposite. The first is that the ability to design very unique and interesting business cards has increased. But at the same time because you have so many different people with things like Adobe Photoshop on their computer at home, they’ve taken to designing the cards themselves.

Now, I have no problem if you want to design your own business card, because I think this adds a level of personality to the cards that would otherwise be lacking. What happens though is that people without design experience go for the simplest form of business card that they can rather than risk designing something harder.

While it might be more difficult to design something beyond the realms that you’re used to, it’s not only good practice, but because business cards are so cheap to print, you won’t be out much money if your card isn’t quite what you want it to be.

The important thing to remember is that a business card is just as much advertising as a brochure or television ad. This right here is the fact people aren’t thinking about when they make those rather bland, repetitive business cards. They’re viewing the cards as nothing more than a means of handing out contact information, and not a means of being remembered.

If a card is going to represent you when you aren’t around, shouldn’t that card be as effective as possible? Don’t you want it to have as much personality in it as you do? Get to work finding something you’ve never seen before, and something that tells people exactly who you are, and I think you’ll find the responses you get to your card will greatly improve. The first time someone looks at your card and exclaims, “That is so interesting looking,” you know you’ve succeeded.

How much thought have you put to the way you fold your brochures? Do you realize what an important element of the brochure this can be, and what a big impact it will have on the person who picks it up and starts reading?

A lot of people don’t realize just how much a fold can alter the brochure design. Whenever you consider any brochure layout the first thing you need to do is look at how the folds are going to be, and create your image accordingly.

What often happens is that when people are designing brochures they see the image only when it is completely spread out, and not exactly how it will be when folded. This creates a false image. Even when folds are taken into consideration, most people only go with a few basic fold patterns to make it as easy as possible to see mentally what the final result will be.

But by doing so people fail to create some very unique custom brochures with folding patterns you don’t usually see in advertising. A more complicated fold pattern also gives you potentially more pages to work with. The folding greatly changes the graphic design aspect of the brochure.

Here are two direct comparisons for folding patters, and I’m guessing you’ve seen both of them at some point.

The first fold patter is often used in restaurants for their menus. It has two flaps on the left and right side that open up into a much larger inner area. Here are the benefits: you can have a much larger, single image or chunk of information in the center of your brochure. If most of what you have to say goes together, or you like a larger amount of images, this folding patter will probably be best for you.

Another style instead folds several times in such a way as to create a mini book that goes from one smaller page to the next. If you have a lot of different points you’re trying to make this will be the perfect kind of folding to use, because it allows you to have a separate page for each point.

You should talk to whoever your printer is to find out exactly what can be done with different shapes and sizes of brochure paper. After all, some folding patterns require a larger more square shape initially, while others need a much longer, narrower rectangle. If the printed size is wrong the brochure will never look as good.

Brochures are one of the more intricate forms of advertising for a reason. Not only do you have to write and design them, but you have to consider how you’ll end up folding them as well. But then again, they’re also a style you can’t really match with any other advertisement.

This is where postcards come in as one of the best style of color printing for the business without the big budget. The truth is that many small businesses just aren’t going to have the money for a lot of high priced, wide spread marketing tactics. Sometimes it can seem like all your cash is being eaten up by the costs of actually running the business, leaving you with a small, precious amount left over for your marketing needs, but marketing simply needs to be done if you want to generate more sales.

Focusing entirely on costs, here are a few reasons why you should consider postcards for your marketing needs.

Postcards are by far one of the easiest forms of marketing to design. I’d say that flyers are the only other kind of marketing that are on par with postcards when it comes to the ease of designing, but then, most flyers are larger than a postcard, and so they require you to fill in more space.

The only real focus you need with a postcard is to have a design that will quickly draw the eye and deliver your message. For those unable to hire out some professional designers, you can handle the job yourself, something you couldn’t say for a brochure or catalog.

Next, the process of printing postcards is a lot cheaper than the other forms of color printing. Because you’re printing something so small the costs naturally go down in comparison to most other styles.

The postage cost for sending postcards is also considerably lower than other kinds of through the mail advertising. Postcards get a special postage rate much lower than a standard envelope.

If you really wanted to save costs even more in relation to the postage, and you were trying to target a much more local crowd, you could even go door to door putting your postcards into people’s mail yourself. While you would have to take the additional time to do it, you’d have additional savings to boast, and for those with a shoestring marketing budget, that can be a particularly important fact.

The low cost coupled with the ability to design and implement them yourselves makes postcards something any small business owner should look into. And, best of all, they work for any kind of business. No matter what industry you’re in, postcards are still a great addition to your marketing.

There are few things that should matter as much to a company as what their brand name means to people. This isn’t just about what a person thinks about the business, or even how well the business is doing. Consider the brand like a spokesperson, the true face you send out to the public, and if that face isn’t what people like to look at you’re going to be in for some trouble.

Take the Disney brand name as a prime example. Whether or not you love the company, you hate the company, or you just don’t really care that much, I bet you still know what that brand represents to the public. Disney has done such a great job over the years building up that brand name that you can’t help but know what they stand for, and that should be the model for your brand.

But how do you do it?

First, know where your brand name currently stands. This is a very important factor before you do anything to touch that existing brand. Send out surveys if you need to, anything to get a feel for what people currently think about your brand. If they like what you’re doing, do your best to keep up the good work, and if they aren’t quite sure what your brand really means to them, you need to start getting your name out there.

I’m sure most companies are going to have a wide variety of commercial printing they use for their advertising. The question becomes, how prominent is your brand name on your marketing material?

Every color brochure needs to have a clear focus centered on that very brand name. If you hand someone a flyer, your logo and company brand needs to be a clear presence. Are your postcards showing up in people’s mail? What kind of emphasis on your brand name have you placed?

Today the trend has shifted towards a lot of companies, especially smaller ones, handling their own ad designs. Anyone with a computer and the program Illustrator can start designing ads, but that doesn’t mean they’ll know exactly what they’re doing.

For a brand to flourish it needs to be given every opportunity to get to the consumer. You need to make sure that every form of commercial printing you use is going to have not only your company logo, but also a consistent style people will recognize.

Disney’s brand goes beyond just the logo they use to the kinds of colors and imagery they embrace. Take a cue from one of the biggest companies around to improve your brand’s standing in the market place. The best way to learn is by looking at those who can teach you something.