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Color Psychology: Projecting the Image You Want with Color
Color selection is a very important element in print design because colors have an effect on your visitors before they begin to read the content of your document. Thus, it is very important for you to consider your target audience, the psychology of color, and the corporate image you wish to project BEFORE designing your publications.
When color is used correctly, it can add impact and clarity to your message and highlight important points. When color is used incorrectly, it can compromise your message and confuse your target audience.
Color can work for your printed materials in various ways:
1. Color emphasizes, highlights, and leads the eye to important points.
2. Color identifies recurring themes (i.e. titles and subtitles are usually the same colors).
3. Conversely, color can differentiate, such as different colors in pie charts and bar graphs.
4. Color symbolizes and triggers emotions and associations.
The interpretation of a color depends on culture, profession, and personal preference. In general, the colors red, orange, and yellow are "exciting" colors and the colors purple, blue, and green are "calming" colors.
Interpretation of color is not always a matter of personal preference. For example, in Western cultures the color white symbolizes purity; however, in China the color white symbolizes death.
To summarize, it is very important for you to consider your target audience, the psychology of color, and the corporate image you wish to project BEFORE you construct your web site, printed materials, and logo.
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White space and web page layout/design
White space, also known as negative space, is the term describing open space between design elements. It can be between letters, words, or paragraphs of text; space in and outside of graphics, and between all of the elements of the page. It is essential for providing spatial relationships between visual items, and actually guides your reader's eye from one point to another.
White space is an important layout technique often overlooked by the inexperienced designer. While some artists concentrate heavily on what to put in, they can overlook what to leave out. A design that is to be visually appealing must also be easy on the eyes. Without an adequate amount of white space, text would be unreadable, graphics would lose their emphasis, and there would be no balance between the elements on a page.
White space takes on an added importance on the web because more of a strain is placed on the eyes than with print material. You'll find that going through the same amount of web pages as print pages can be more visually demanding, one of the reasons being that you usually find yourself staring up at monitor flickering pixels coarser than printed ink. White space provides our brains with much-needed breathing room to absorb the material displayed before us.
Treat white space as more than just a background. Treat it as an integral part to your page design. You'll find it increases your layout's appeal with less visual "noise," while augmenting the visual power of your message.
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Which Programs to Use
Ideally, you should use either QuarkXPress or Adobe Pagemaker to create your final mechanical. Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, and Adobe Photoshop, while important and necessary tools for desktop publishing, and programs that can create page layouts, are not nearly as well suited for creating mechanicals as Quark or Pagemaker.
In addition, the programs mentioned above exist on both Macintosh and IBM (windows) platforms.
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Setting Up Digital Files
When you create a new document, set your page size to the final trim size of your piece. Whenever possible, create a single document that includes both the front and back of a two-sided piece. Both major page layout programs allow you to add as many new pages as you need. If the horizontal or vertical dimension of your piece gets swapped between the front and back, rotate all the elements of one of the sides 90º.
Many people become confused with the terms trim, safety and bleed. Quite simply, trim is the final size your piece will be cut to. The safety is the distance your text must be placed inside of the trim to ensure that it is not accidentally cut off in the bindery. And finally, bleed is the distance an area must protrude beyond the trim so that a color or picture comes right to the edge, or trim, of your piece.
Do not draw in cropmarks. Quark, Pagemaker, and the other desktop publishing programs all create cropmarks to the proper document size with an option enabled in the print dialog box.
Truetype vs. Postscript
Many people question using TrueType vs. Postscript typefaces. Certain imagesetters have no problem with TrueType fonts while others do. When you are sending your fonts with a job, you need to know what to look for on your computer. TrueType is contained with a single, suitcase-shaped icon. Postscript fonts have two parts; a suitcase icon and a printer font represented by a square icon with the letter “A” on it or an icon shaped like a printer. You can check your fonts by opening the suitcase font and seeing the screen fonts inside. On the PC side, PostScript Type 1 and Type 2 font files are identified by the .PFB, .PFA, .PFM, and .AFM extension; TrueType by .TTF.
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Scans, Graphics, and Photographs
Using pictures of any kind in a page layout program is a fairly simple, straight-forward affair as long as you follow the rules. Different kinds of pictures, because of how they are created and how they are reproduced on press, are handled differently. In the broadest sense there are just two kinds of pictures; line art and half-tones.
Line art is the simplest format to understand. It is your basic, on-color scan. Imagine a silhouette of a bird. That is simple line art. When you scan it, you need to scan it at a resolution between 800 and 1200 dots per inch (dpi). Once you understand what resolution means in desktop publishing and how it affects your printed piece, scanning and manipulating images becomes much easier.
Picture a simple window screen. A broad screen has large boxes; a fine screen tiny boxes. If you lay down an image over these two screens you immediately notice that there are many more tiny boxes in the fine screen. Pay particular attention to the boxes along the object’s edge. The edge of the image on the broad screen is made up of boxes that look like stairs. That’s the staircasing, rough, bitmapped edge you want to avoid. The fine screen, with many more boxes has a much smoother edge. It has more boxes because it is a higher resolution. Now that you understand line art resolution, lets look at halftones.
A halftone is a somewhat imperfect attempt to recreate the look of a photographic print on a printed piece of paper. On photographic paper, colors are solid, they move and blend smoothly from one shade to the next. To simulate the effect, a printing press prints percentages of dots that fool the eye into seeing a smooth transition between white and solids.
Dots are measured as lines per inch (lpi)(ie. 133, 150, 200). The computer, through the imagesetter, creates the dots on film. Dpi, or dots per inch is how this resolution is measured. Industry theory varies, but 1.5 to 2 times the line screen is the acceptable resolution for a
halftone image. One problem that arises frequently is a belief that when it comes to resolution in scanned photographs, more is better. It’s not true.
High resolution is no substitute for balanced color, good lighting, or any of the many factors that create a good picture. In fact, too high of a resolution just eats up storage space and processing time because film resolutions is set at the imagesetter and excess resolution is simply discarded.
Never artificially add resolution. For example, never make a 3" x 5" scan at 72 dpi then use your controls to raise the resolution to 300 dpi. The computer makes up pixels to increase the resolution. It does this by averaging the color of adjacent pixels, then adding the result between them. You end up with a heavily digitized looking picture that lack all sharpness. You can lower resolution without losing quality. Scan pictures at a higher resolution than you need, then use
your image size controls to adjust your picture’s physical size and resolution to roughly 300 dpi at the size it will be used. There is one important thing to do to scans. All scans have to be converted from RGB - the red, green, and blue colors that scanners and monitors use to create color - to the CMYK or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black colors that the printing press uses to produce color with ink. More detailed information on this subject can be found in the color section that follows.
Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for photographic manipulation. Save your final files as CMYK tiffs (tagged image file format), or as eps, (encapsulated postscript files). There are minor differences in the two formats, mostly in the way Quark and Pagemaker handle the images, but the printed results are indistinguishable.
There is yet one more picture format. Vector graphics are created in drawings and illustrations programs. The two most popular programs are Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. Whether it’s a map, logo, or full-color illustration for a children’s book, this art is easy to place, use, and print if you just remember a few things. Make sure you use CMYK colors. Make sure you send along any typefaces used in this art or convert your type to paths or outlines, and finally, make sure you include these files along with your page layout document.
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Converting Colors to CMYK
We’ve already discussed the differences between RGB and CMYK color with scans, but there’s a bit more to know about color and how to use it in other elements of your project. All the major desktop publishing programs allow you to create and use color. Remember that, in almost every instance, your printer will need CMYK colors. Often named colors; pink, gold, cobalt, etc., used in programs need to be converted to CMYK. It’s just a click of a button, but it’s necessary to create film properly. If you do not convert colors, you’ll end up with a separate piece of film for each color in your document. Paying for six, twelve or more extra sheets of film can eat up profits in a hurry. Here’s how to convert colors CMYK. Illustration programs allow you to define, or create colors as you work. You can select from hundreds of predefined colors, be it Pantone®, Toyo® or named colors supplied with the program. Generally, you can convert any of these colors to the 4-color process, CMYK, by clicking the “Process” box in the color palette. It is really that easy. Once you do this, any color you use will separate properly creating film to accurately reproduce it. If you need a spot color, just turn off the “Process” box and you’ll get a fifth plate for that color.
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