A Powerful Tool

We often share our finished projects but rarely the craft we employ to get there.

Colour is a powerful tool, it can influence our perceptions, our emotions and our mood. We spend an inordinate amount of time exploring colour for our clients. Defining their colour universes based on factors like heritage, audience, environment, purpose and vision.

Starting with research, we explore our clients colour use, we make sure they understand their audiences and start to build colour palettes by creating mood boards as a starting point for colour definition.

Widely studied from Goethe and Schiller in 1798 to Carl Jung and contemporary studies of colour. Colour impacts how we feel about the brands, products and environments we encounter. Contemporary research tells us that customers generally make an initial judgment on a product within 90 seconds of interaction and about 62%-90% of that judgment is based on colour.

We consider what colour landscapes our clients ‘own' and how they can be harnessed, expanded and evolved to better speak to their audiences.

Mood boards allow us to play with subtle flexes and additions and how a complex colour palette can be ordered to provide both identifiable impact and pace.

When a palette has been defined we start to extract colours to build a clear hierarchy for use.

Next comes colour testing, we always test proposed colour palettes carefully across a variety of print substrates and processes, exploring colour options, tones, tints and the impact of substrate on colour. In some cases this is a laborious task, for Claridge’s we ran hundreds of print tests over two days to get the Jade green just right, with the energy and vibrancy our vision for the brand palette demanded.

And last but not least we define guidelines for use on every possible application from web, to print and three dimensional product.