The use of color can have a powerful effect upon your printed documents. Color draws in your audience, providing you with a better opportunity to get your message across. This is why it’s so important to utilize a reliable, high-quality color printer at your business. Read more
Utilizing color is a great way to separate your company from the competition. Finding a way to stand out in a crowded marketplace can be a major challenge when it comes to marketing your products or services. Without the right use of color in your branding approach, your business runs the risk of getting lost in the mix amongst the many other businesses within your industry.
Take a look at some of the larger corporations in today’s world. Amazon, Target, Walmart, Netflix, Starbucks, and Facebook are a handful of big names that generally come to mind when you think of big businesses. Each uses a specific color scheme for their branding methods. You can easily envision their colors because each of these companies uses a consistent approach to branding, whether it’s in print, online, or in-person.
A few tips for color usage
When it comes to using color for branding, there are a few things to keep in mind to help improve the visibility of your business. First, be sure to create a bold contrast by using the right combination of colors that will catch the eye. But, be careful not to use too many colors—with more colors in play, a customer is less likely to associate your marketing efforts with your brand.
Next, make sure your logo or message is legible. Be careful with tinting, effects, and any color combinations that make your output difficult to comprehend. When all is said and done, your audience needs to be able to clearly recognize your brand and its message.
Finally, be sure to remain consistent with your colors across all mediums. Your target audience needs to connect your colors with your business. This will happen over time as customers repeatedly interact with your brand.
The importance of color printing
Now that we’ve looked at the importance of color in branding, along with some valuable color usage techniques, let’s focus on the value of color printing. Color alignment across all marketing materials requires printing equipment that can consistently match the hues of your particular color scheme. It takes the right print setup combined with state-of-the-art technology to produce high-quality print materials. After all of the hard work your marketing team puts into its color scheme, it is essential to make sure your equipment can produce the best materials that best match the vision of your brand.
For more information on color printers and how they can keep your company’s colors consistent throughout all media outputs, contact Infomax Systems today.
Color printing is essential in the workplace. A simple equipment upgrade to accommodate color is surprisingly affordable, and it nets both measurable and intangible benefits for virtually any business in any industry. Here are just a few the ways printing in color can help your business gain a strategic advantage over the competition.
Detail and Quality
Color images can pack more detail into the same space as their black and white counterparts. They add dynamics and entire dimensions to any message, and the color is able to capture detail that improves overall image quality. Remembering that printing is ultimately just another form of communication, these are important facts. Any printing that is intended to convey instructional or emphatic information is more effective when presented with color. In fact, a great deal of research has investigated the topic, and the results are clear: color messages are 65 percent easier to understand than black and white. This leads to an 80-percent reduction in error and a 3.9-percent drop in failure costs. In this way, color printing can easily save money in long-term operational costs.
Aesthetics
There is a more obvious reason to use color: it’s prettier. This is easy to dismiss until you dwell on it for a moment. In terms of advertising and attention grabbing, color will obviously do better than simple monochromatic approaches. The same studies that looked at interoffice impacts also compared the effects of color on customers. Color printing increases readership by 55 percent. This applies to promotional emails and static advertisements (like billboards, posters, or fliers). Implementing color designs also improves brand recognition by 80 percent and boosts attention span and recall by 82 percent. These are large numbers that show color’s aesthetics will nearly double your returns on any given outreach to customers.
Accessibility
These statistics are powerful, but a business always has to consider their bottom line. If the cost of color printing isn’t returned to a company, then there is little reason to invest in it. This argument crumbles pretty quickly—except in terms of plain-text documents, color printing averages a lower cost per page than monochrome. There are obvious exceptions to this, but generally speaking, a high-resolution black-and-white photo is more expensive to print than its color counterpart. This loops back to packing more information in a given space. For any particular image, a monochromatic print requires more dots per inch to convey the same quality as a color print. So, unless you are printing a word-only document (which probably doesn’t need to be more than an email), you save money by going with color.
If you want to push your business to the next level, there is little reason to avoid a color upgrade to help you do so. It isn’t a business expense, it’s a savvy investment. Contact Infomax Office Systems today to find the right color printer for your organization.
With all of the competition vying for the attention of your clients and prospects, it’s imperative for businesses to stand out and be noticed. And among the glut of competitors companies face in the majority of industries today, capturing your target audience’s attention can prove to be quite a challenge. One of the tools at your disposal that often flies beneath the radar is color printing, the impact of which is vastly understated.
Utilizing color in your marketing strategy is a great way to capture attention, improve retention, and invoke a response. According to a study by The University of Loyola, Maryland, color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent. And a survey by Harris Interactive revealed 54 percent of respondents are more likely to read marketing pieces when they’re printed in color. There is no questioning the value color printing brings to your marketing efforts, and printing in color is more affordable than you think.
Using color printing to gain a competitive advantage.
Use a color to influence mood: Cool colors such as blue, green, silver, and purple tend to have a calming effect on recipients. Warm colors such as red, yellow, orange, and pink tend to stimulate recipients. It’s key to understand your target audience, and use the colors that will produce the response you want to invoke.
Mix color text into the body of your message: Even a small amount of color text in any of your literature or marketing materials will significantly improve impact and response by helping readers easily locate the information you want them to find.
Be consistent with the colors you use for your professional identity: Create guidelines for your brand that establish the colors you will use when communicating with your audience to create your own look and feel, and cultivate recognition.
Color is a powerful tool enabling businesses to stand out among the competition. Utilize it in your company’s communications to capture attention and create a long-lasting impression. Infomax Office Systems has a color printer to meet your Iowa-area business’s needs.
Ink colors can seem complicated—a set of cryptic codes that determine your final color result. The color consistency these codes support is important to reinforce your brand and coordinate matching collateral. Let’s take a look at how ink works in the “black box” that is a modern commercial printer.
CMYK / Full-Color Printing / 4-Color Printing
CMYK is easily the most popular color printing model, providing a wide range of color in a small machine footprint. In CMYK, four ink colors are combined to create a final color. Cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K) are each housed in their own cartridge. Using a process called halftoning or screening, tiny dot patterns of each component color are mixed on a printing plate and then transferred to paper. The tiny dot patterns, made from the four inks, determine the color we perceive at regular magnification.
Spot Color / Solid Ink
For short runs and promotional products, spot color can be the best tool. A combination of 14 base colors are mixed according to Pantone’s formula (Pantone Matching System, or PMS) to achieve the final color. Pure spot colors are crisper than CMYK’s dots, and some very bright colors aren’t possible in CMYK.
Choosing and Converting Colors
The Pantone Process Color Guide has Pantone Color Charts that provide the “recipes” for PMS ink colors. Keep in mind that different media and coating/finishing options affect the final appearance of printed color, so different recipes are needed for each in order to get the same side-by-side printed result. The Pantone Bridge Guide also provides recipes; it is a dual ink chart used to match PMS color with CMYK color. The Bridge Guide provides side-by-side comparison of PMS formulas and their CMYK equivalents.
Color is power: it commands attention, provides emotion, and reinforces your brand. With the right combination of ink colors and media, your final result will truly shine. Contact Infomax Office Systems to maximize the impact of color for your company.
Color is everywhere in printed media. It gets your attention, sets the tone, and shares information. Printing in color can help your business project a polished and professional image, but it’s critical to balance the value of color printing with the cost of color toner.
To make the most of color, consider the following few tips for how to use color in your print documents and publications.
Draw attention. The primary reason we use color is for its impact, and choosing a few select applications of color will make your message pop and give you the biggest bang for your buck. Consider the type of publication and what element you want to draw attention to, and focus your color there. You may highlight a deadline or expiration date, bring some life to your headings, or even use compelling images. Think about where you want to draw your reader’s eye and use color to guide them there.
Convey emotion. The human mind is wired in such a way that we draw inherent meaning from color. Choosing your colors with an understanding of their psychological impact will help you get the most out of each use. Orange is an action color, while purple invokes imagination. Red is the color of passion and anger; blue brings a sense of calm, trust, and dependability; and green is a color of peace, nature, and health. Choosing the right color will help boost your message by playing on the mind’s built-in shortcuts.
Stick to your resolutions. When it comes to color images and art, print resolution can make or break your publication. Use images with a resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch) or better for the size you want to print. This quality of image will provide your printer the information it needs to create documents that show all the details. A lower dpi can result in blurry or pixelated images, so skimping on image quality is just a waste of toner.
Figure out fonts. Combining selective use of color with different font types will up the impact of your outputs. Avoid messiness and confusion for your readers by sticking to two or three fonts: one for the body of your text, one for headings, and maybe one for call-outs or quotes. Body (or paragraph) text, works best in black, but headings and call-outs thrive in color. A trick for making your text easy on the eye is to use a serif font, like Times New Roman or Garamond. The additional visual detail in these fonts makes text easier to interpret. Headings work well in sans serif fonts like Helvetica.
Proof it. Printing a proof, or test version, is a best practice for any publication, and it’s especially vital when printing in color. Print one copy and review it closely for readability, detail, and color accuracy. This is the “measure twice, cut once” of the printing world: take the time to be sure your publication will print as you expect and you’ll save yourself the headache (and toner!) down the line.
Color printing can be a powerful tool for catching the eye and directing your audience’s attention. From conveying emotion to showing detail, use color wisely for the perfect printed publication.
Color printing offers a wide array of benefits for small, medium, and large businesses alike. Furthermore, bringing color printing in-house can add even more savings, flexibility, and customization options. In addition to the financial benefits, there are even psychological benefits to utilizing color on your business and marketing materials.
Here are several benefits of in-house color printing:
Boost the quality of your documents today, and watch as your business grows. If you’d like to learn more about the economic benefits of in-house color printing, contact Infomax today.
