Colour in publications
Some of the loftiest titles still restrain the use of colour, or eschew it altogether, for fear of looking too populist.
The same principles apply to magazines. When visiting a foreign country, we have little difficulty in distinguishing the local Vogue rival from that of Cosmopolitan. On its cover, the former will feature a model shot under crisp, dramatic lighting, overlaid with text in no more than two colours, one of them black. The latter will present softer, brighter photography and text in at least three colours, one of them white.
Colour is recognized as a major factor in the selling power of covers. Exactly which colours will generate the highest sales, however, is sadly impossible to pin down. You would expect warm colours to sell best, but in fact blues are often successful, while many publishers shun yellow. On the crowded newsstand anything that stands out can work.
Colour is a functional element of page design. Many publications use colour-coded bars, or slugs, at the top of each page to differentiate sections, helping readers navigate through the issue.
Tints separate boxes and sidebars from the body of a page and blocks of colour overlaid with type are used to draw the reader's attention to content elsewhere in the issue.
Visual hierarchy is essential to printed pages. A field of similar objects is a psychological turn-off. Outside the tabloid press, giant headlines are a no-no, so often the lead story on a newspaper spread will be distinguished by having the biggest picture.
In magazines, a feature article will run over several spreads, with the start often flagged by a dramatic composition of form and colour.
Cover stories
Since the first blossoming of the magazine market during the interwar period, publishers have been well aware of the power of colour to transform a cover into a visual sales pitch. Although photography has largely taken over from graphical compositions in mass-market titles, bold use of colour remains a powerful tool.
Vogue's early covers were typical of art deco style, comprising simple, rational arrangements of shapes in strong but muted colours. Today, content usually wins over form, but bright colours, clean lines and rich flesh tones compensate for lost graphical dynamism.
Designed by Neville Brody, The Face was a pop-culture icon in 1980s Britain. Coinciding with the desktop publishing revolution, it applied post-punk attitudes to graphic design.
The foreground graphic on this cover features clean lines set against a cloudy background and is coloured in broken tints to create harmony. In today's harder-headed market, a solid background and primary colours would more likely be used.
This cover of Fortune magazine was designed by prominent artist Fernand Léger in a style he had developed in printmaking. The influence of Picasso and Braque is evident, as are elements reminiscent of Miró and Mondrian.
For 21st Century lifestyle magazines such as the internationally successful wallpaper*, avant-garde graphics are part of the package. The reader is challenged not to find them challenging.
A perennially eye-catching style combines simple lines and psychedelic colours with the graduated tints or 'vignettes' once characteristic of airbrushing and now of computer graphics.
Tutorial by Tom Fraser and Adam Banks, DIGIT magazine © IDG 2006
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Faber & Faber is one of Europe's most important publishers of poetry. This latest redesign of its poetry covers, by Justus Oehler at Pentagram, was inspired by an earlier series by Berthold Wolpe. Bold colour combinations, taking the place of graphics, were chosen to express the mood of each book.
Standing out and blending in
Whether thanks to the desktop-publishing revolution, strong economies, or a genuine public appetite for ever more printed materials, the world seems to be increasingly crammed with publications, both desirable and unsolicited. One way to make yours stand out from the crowd is by using colour in ways nobody else has thought of.
Making company annual reports look interesting is a classic design challenge. This one was produced for Zumtobel, a leading lighting manufacturer, by the studio of graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. The cover features a bas-relief image of a vase of flowers in heat-moulded plastic. For the inside pages, the vase has been photographed under various coloured lights, showing the power of the company's products to transform.
The Waterways Trust was formed to help realize the potential of Britain's historic canal network. Its corporate identity, created by Pentagram partner John Rushworth, combines a nature-themed logo with evocative black-&-white photography by Phil Sayer. The restrained palette is as effective here as a riot of colour might be for an organization with a different image to project.
This spread for leading British design and architecture magazine Blueprint breaks almost all the rules, but it respects colour proportions, splashing a small amount of warm orange on a field of recessive blue.
On the newsstand, no one can hear you scream. The brightest of colours won't get you noticed unless you use it well. See which of these covers catches your eye. Among the first will be Golf, with its high-impact red-and-white diagonal stripes, and Q, which draws attention to itself by being more self-effacing than the norm.
Buy the book
Book publishers, too, must attract attention to their products. Just as successive editions of a magazine must have enough in common visually to be recognizable to loyal readers, books in the same imprint or by the same author are often designed as a coherent series. Each book is complete in itself, though, and some flavour of its content must be conveyed.
'Story papers' were first produced on steam-driven presses in the mid-nineteenth century, but they were revitalized by the addition of colour. Hugo Gernsback's titles, such as Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories, contributed to the rise of the science-fiction genre, with covers evoking the marvels to be found within.
Colour is essential to the thrill of pulp fiction. These early examples are among the more restrained. As themes became racier towards the 1960s, palettes followed suit. Only the most garish of covers would suitably complement a title like How Cheap Can You Get? or Fast, Loose and Lovely.
Called upon to redesign the back catalogue of Spanish-language publishing house Losada, Fernando Gutiérrez placed illustrations by Marion Deuchars on solid blocks of colour.
Pentagram's redesign of Faber & Faber's covers in the late 1980s provided a model for many other publishers. It was updated in 1994 by John McConnell using black, white and primary colours to achieve maximum on-shelf impact.
When an author has achieved recognition and popularity, it pays to give his or her books a distinctive look. Pentagram partner Justus Oehler designed this Faber & Faber series of Banana Yoshimoto’s fiction using Japanese characters on background colours appropriate to each work.
This article was extracted from The Complete Guide To Colour by Tom Fraser and Adam Banks published by new graphics publisher, ILEX - the digital creative's publisher of choice.
A comprehensive, cutting-edge reference book for a new generation of colour-users, The Complete Guide to Colour brings together key elements of colour theory, practice, and application in one easy-to-use format. From abstract colour theory to the more practical implications of using CMYK and RGB, this authoritative volume may well be the only colour book you'll ever need.
Tom Fraser founded Designer Training Ltd, a firm specializing in professional instruction for design-orientated software. Adam Banks has worked with digital imaging since the early 80s, and contributes regular reviews and tutorials to computer publications.
The Complete Guide to Colour is available at a retail price of £19.95. However, Digit and ILEX have teamed up to save you money. To order your copy with a 20 per cent discount plus FREE P&P in the UK, visit www.ilex-press.com/digitoffer