Best Practices for Graphic Designers, Color Works

Brian Collins established a simpli-

stic approach using clarity and delight.

Optimum wanted the public to remember

its name. The best method of doing so is

with colors that are fresh and that stand

out from the crowd. Notice the comple-

mentary color use of the period at the

end of the logomark.

Color in

Branding 1

Brian Collins

Color is incredibly subjective. I don’t think you see

color. You feel it. It’s like music; it goes right through

your system. It’s both independent of memory and

deeply connected to memory.

fig. 001

44 Color Works

2.4

Awareness Color in Branding 1

2.1

Coca-Cola always shows that

familiar colors can be used strategically

to create new impressions. With a combi-

nation of the famous red and the original

bottle form, this iconic brand became

rejuvenated and expressive.

In our work with the cable and Internet provider Optimum, the company

wanted to brand itself in a way that made it much more present in

people’s lives. It wanted to reestablish itself as the leading cable com-

pany in its market. So we started by thinking about where Optimum is

seen most. After its set-top boxes, its next most visible platform was

its trucks. The company has 4,000 trucks!

We wanted people to remember the word optimum, to have them think

about it as a value, not just as a company. Therefore, we wanted six

colors to be deployed across all the trucks, so it would feel fresh.

Whenever you saw the trucks, you’d see incredible colors. We chose

the colors that were between other colors—light green, beige, and so

on. They’re sort of quirky colors, but they’re colors that you don’t see

on trucks. It’s interesting to see these quirky colors in the world for

a massive cable company.

The idea was to associate the Optimum service with simplicity and

delight, through color. We weren’t using color as a branding mechanism,

but rather as a behavior. As a result, the brand appears and it starts to

signal the promise of how the Optimum service will make you feel.

Therefore, in this sense color is used very aggressively, very boldly, and

very dramatically—but also very simply.

When it comes to color in branding, you have to come to the table know-

ing there are preferences and prejudices. In order to get over them, you

have to frame your ideas in terms of the project’s ideals. When we

designed the Times Square Alliance Organization, we chose a hot neon

fluorescent pink as the brand color. The logo was pink. The staff jump-

suits were pink. Why? Because Times Square is the most visually aggres-

sive, cacophonous place in the world, and we needed a color that stood

out. Choosing pink wasn’t a matter of my personal tastes. Based on the

client’s needs and budget, pink was the best choice.

Now, pink can be a controversial color. It’s loaded with preconceptions.

To show the client its value, we had to have an objective conversation

about how we’d use pink as a tool and as a system. The Alliance had

scores of people in Times Square cleaning the streets, and we wanted

the organization and its employees to get credit for that. Previously, the

Alliance’s street teams wore gray uniforms, which made them basically

invisible. By increasing their visibility, we were able to better highlight

the Alliance’s work. Just the act of seeing someone sweeping in a pink

Times Square uniform would say, “We care about our environment.”

We wanted to make that operation very visible. The client chose pink

because color was used as a strategy to surface behavior.

Even with very well-established brands, familiar colors can be used

strategically to create new impressions. Coca-Cola is the most famous

brand in the world and it’s the best-distributed brand in the world. You

see it everywhere. The problem is that ubiquity leads to invisibility. We

were approached by Coca-Cola to reimagine what the brand language

would be for revitalizing its icon. We revitalized what had been an under-

leveraged piece of Coca-Cola’s iconography—the Coca-Cola bottle.

6.5

1.5

2.4

2.2/2.4

fig. 002