Brief 16 // Typocircle // Colour Palette

The next thing on the agenda before starting on creating the products was to decide on a colour scheme. I wanted to move away from colours that I have previously used on other projects. I was initially going to base this around the use of orange & black, but I have used that a lot recently.

The colour scheme has been based around the stock that I want to use for part of the publications. The stock is GFSmith Lilac. The colour itself isn't one that I would normally choose, but I feel that this is a good thing and something new to try. So the colour palette has to work when printed over the top of the lilac stock.

Using adobe Kuler, I looked at colours that were around the same colour range of a similar digital colour to the stock. This brought up the idea of using blue and green, on top of the lilac. 

From the screen shot above, I looked at using the blue, lilac and the cream on the end. 

As a colour palette I thought these colours worked together really well and set against other in a nice colour scheme, but it felt quite feminine and not really a scheme you would use to try and advertise a live typographic talk. The colours are too pale - being more on the pastel side of things, which I think would just blend into the background. 

I think the colour pallete needs to be stronger and use much more bold and vibrant colours, so it firstly catches people eye when they see it, but also so that it is bold enough to make it legible and bold enough to read.

Whilst using adobe kuler in the above example, it came up with green as a possible colour, now above it shows it as a pastel green, which isn't what I want. So setting the main colour as green I could work out colours to use from that. 

This screen shot shows much more bold and vibrant colours, colours I would associate with advertising and more print based products to attract the audience. Blue came up in the colour palette again, but also right on the end a much more vibrant purple / lilac did, which made me think about using the blue and green on top of the lilac stock. 

Sticking with these colours, I took the CMYK values and adjusted them slightly more within Illustrator to get a good combination of the two colours which worked together and created a strong colour palette. 

To test the colour on the stock I set up a document which had all the branding elements on with both the colours. 

From testing the colours on the stock, I am happy with the outcome and how it all fits together as an identity. The green and blue work well against the lilac stock and all set each other off well to create a bold statement within the print.