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Since I love working with colour so much, I decided to take on the colour orange as a blog topic.

Orange is glowing like the autumn leaves and sunsets at sea, vital and tangy like the colours of flowers and fruit, and dramatic in a way that’s not as strong as red, since it’s tempered by containing more yellow. You could say it’s a bit more fun or flippant.

Orange and it’s paler counterparts peach, apricot and coral are stimulating colours, stimulating the mood and the appetite in most of us. For that reason, along with red and yellow, it’s often used in food and beverage signage and menus.

It has been called outgoing, uninhibited and free, promoting conversation and social interaction.

“In colour psychology, the colour orange is optimistic and uplifting – it lifts our spirits…adding spontaneity and a positive way of looking at life.”

It’s said it increases the oxygen supply to the brain and stimulates mental activity. It encourages activity and sociality, and increases creativity.

It can be fun and flamboyant, warm and happy. Kids love it.

I can hardly believe this, but it’s one of the colours apparently least-liked by adults, both men and women. I personally don’t get it. I’m one of the orange-lovers as opposed to orange-haters, but it obviously makes people feel strongly, one way or the other.

As it’s a strong colour and evokes strong feelings (sometimes not positive ones as illustrated by the orange-haters), in web design we use it sparingly as perhaps a heading colour to draw attention to a topic on a website.

Then again, Home Depot uses it as their main logo colour – probably because it’s an attention-grabbing colour and their logo is designed to inspire activity and productivity, especially within the home.

Another example of orange used in logos is Gatorade – connected with athletics and fitness, it promotes activity and energy.

I’m good with it, but this research serves to inform us that depending on your company, product or purpose, it may not be the best choice for your imagery as a business – unless you’re in the youth market, or food & beverage market.

What should it be? The recommendation I make is buy big ads and pay for colour. When buying a newspaper ad, deciding between greyscale and colour may be a difficult decision to make if the newspaper is adding a hefty colour charge to your ad cost. You can see with this example which one packs the most punch.

If you want to go with the cheapest price in this case, I would say your resulting ad will not be as successful as the colour version.

Then again, there are ways to explore making this work for you in black and white in another way, by converting the photograph to art shapes. This will depend on the product or image you have and what your message will be.

Sometimes simple is good if you have an image easily translated to art shapes.

Maybe your neighbourhood coffee shop is trying to get you to their new location. Here’s a very basic example using a photo taken of the outside of the business so you can recognize the shop on the street. Start with the converted photo, add the logo and message, and you see it is a clean attractive way to go and you save the cost of the colour charges!

Let your designer guide you – they will be looking at you and/or your product with fresh eyes and their job is to portray your materials in the most eye-catching way possible. Maybe the ad above could have been a photograph of logo’d coffee cup instead – still having the address big enough to draw the eye at the end of the ad; so you need to be willing to explore options that could be more interesting than you originally thought about.

Rocks rock! I have always loved rocks. As a youngster I had rock collections in old cigar boxes, all sectioned off and labelled with the type of rock specimen it was. When I got to high school I took some geology to learn more and my love of rocks remains.

They’re so visually interesting because when faced with a ‘field’ of them, they are so varied in colour, shape, texture and size.

You wonder where they came from, how they were formed and how long they’ve been there.

They’re tangible. I love to hold them in my hand – I feel like I’m connected to the earth by doing so. I like to feel their weight. They are solid, strong and durable, so I guess that’s where the saying ‘Solid as a rock’ comes from.

I like that rock is old – much older than we are. It seems to me that rocks must ‘live’ forever.

What would we do without rocks? We crush them into concrete, we make counter tops with them, we mine their minerals for health, we mine their gems for commerce, and we carve them for art.

I think it’s safe to say, they’ll be with us a long time and we will no doubt find more uses for them than ever!

For myself, I’m happy to look at them and enjoy them as I find them.

*And I try not to bring too many home!

If it weren’t for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no song.
Carl Perkins

It’s been a while since I posted a blog. There are lots of excuses – I was busy, there were other things to do, summer came and went, but I simply wasn’t inspired.

Now I’m newly inspired again – mainly due to a creative conference I attended recently. You find little nuggets of wisdom in the things that come up – like the image featured here.

It was a slide from one of the presentations I attended, reminding us that ‘creativity is just making interesting connections between things’. This is inspiration because although I knew that, this reminded me to look for those visceral connections in visuals, verbiage and styles in the creative process of a project.

Inspiration came from knowing that other creatives are dealing with the same things as I am, like hearing them admit that playfulness and fun need to be a big part of their day. The same presenter who created this slide said, “The more fun and play in my work the better people respond to the end result”. It’s OK to joke around and ‘play’ with the material to see what comes out of it. It will often bring something out you may have missed, and if not you at least had a little fun in the process.

Another message I took away was that collaboration is actually inspiration. To collaborate is to be inspired by others and their ideas, whether it’s with a client or another creative person. It reminded me that it makes my job easier to really listen and collaborate with my clients – leading to a better result in that we’re not just making something ‘pretty’, we are putting heart and soul into it and communicating that message.

So with a little fun and collaboration, the creativity and inspiration will come! Works for me!

I’ll be looking for more inspiration by staying connected with my creative community at other upcoming events.