Are You Ready for Color?

You get more than a billion hits if you search for the word color online, and if you try to refine the search you still get an unmanageable number of hits. That makes it harder to dig in and get educated on all of the things you need to know before you decide to get started with color. Let’s fix that.

Let’s start with the highest level view, and why we are having this conversation. Mary Wells Lawrence, a member of the Advertising Hall of Fame, says, “People are very sophisticated about advertising now. You have to entertain them. You have to present a product honestly and with a tremendous amount of pizzazz and flair, the way it's done in a James Bond movie. But you can't run the same ad over and over again. You have to change your approach constantly to keep on getting their attention." HVTO documents have the same requirement. Sending bills and statements that look the same as they did last year, five years ago, ten years ago or twenty years ago may not hurt your relationship with your customer, but bills and statements that have pizzazz capture the recipients’ attention and give you a chance to build a closer relationship.  This may also help you with a customer service incident that might have driven a customer away.

Color is a large part of the pizzazz story. Making the leap into color requires a complete understanding of what it takes today to generate the bills and statements you print. Is your document composition system color capable? Do you have people who understand the concepts of color management and how to integrate color management into the current production print workflow? Do you have a plan for which color output device you’ll choose? The point is that when you decide to make the leap into color, it’s going to take more than just selecting a color and adding it to the design to be successful.

The goal is not color just to prove you can use color, but color to guide the customer to the best view of the information you are trying to communicate. Look at how you might use color to improve the navigation of your document. Look at how you tell a customer to contact you. Look at how you tell a customer about the relationship they have with you, and look at how you let them know about new opportunities to do business with you.

Once you get a few ideas, the next question is about the software at your disposal. Does the document composition program support the use of smart color? If you add color to the design, can the color be profiled so that color for viewing on the web is appropriate to the screen and color for print is appropriate to your print devices?

Why is that important? Web color is based on red, green and blue (RGB). Print color may be based on RGB or, more commonly, it is based on traditional offset print using cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CYMK). You need to start with an understanding of what your composition environment is capable of doing.

Come back next time and we’ll talk about the mechanics of getting color images into the mix. Color management and asset management both play a role. And, don’t forget: This is a dialogue! Send your questions, ideas, concerns and challenges, and let’s make it a conversation.

Pat McGrew, EDP, is the Data Center and Transaction Segment Evangelist at Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group. Her email address is Pat.McGrew@kodak.com