Meet the Color Mavens
Kate Smith
"As a professional color expert, trend forecaster, engaging speaker and chief color maven, I work with corporate clients and buiness owners on using color to drive sales and elicit a favorable response to their products, their brands, and their marketing messages."
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Julie Hoylen
"Born with a natural sense of style, Julie is a fashion stylist and consultant working in the New York City area. Julie's professional experience in both the fashion and music industries has allowed her to develop a unique perspective on personal style that keeps her clients turning to her when"
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Featured Book
Make effective, unique and credible color choices
Based on research and filled with hundreds of color combinations and illustrations, Color: Messages & Meanings presents color expert, Leatrice Eiseman’s insights on color and emotion, and addresses how best to integrate these qualities into your work, insuring your intended message is communicated.
Buy this book at Amazon.com
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Often the way color is used is inspired by an application or use from an entirely different industry. The watch faces below are a good example.
Employed both in aviation and the submarine world as a visual aid, bright colours ’speak’ to men from these and similar professions in a familiar and what seems to have proven appealing way.
These watches have a photo luminescent dials in blue or orange and in addition they have a version called “stealth” with matte, anti-reflective black hands, a discreet photo luminescent coating enables readability day and night.
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As consumers are we being greenwashed?
With an intense focus on sustainability companies are feeling the pressure to “go green” but what is needed is more than slick packaging, alluring ads, and a story that isn’t backed up with credibility and transparency.
Product designers, marketers and brand managers are all faced with the challenge of raising the bar on what sustainability means in the market.
The article appearing in Business Week coined the term Greenwashed and takes a look at what’s genuine–and what’s green spin? Well worth the read.
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New packaging to alert shoppers to fresh fish.
Smart shoppers with a good eye for colour can now guarantee themselves a fresh catch of fish, scientists revealed today.
New packaging containing a sensor that changes colour when seafood spoils has been designed to hit supermarket shelves.
The sensor responds to the presence of basic volatiles responsible for the characteristic rotten fish odour.
Containing a pH sensitive dye, it changes colour from yellow to orange/red telling customers if pre-packed fish products are spoiled.
The device, designed by a team of Dublin based researchers, has already been tested in collaboration with the country’s biggest seafood producer Oceanpath Ltd, Howth, and supermarket Superquinn.
Results have shown that the sensor colour change indicates the end of product shelf life, changes in freshness parameters and growth in microbial population.
Although the colour change can be seen with the naked eye, a low-cost portable colour scanner has also been developed to enhance colour change under everyday conditions.
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Authored by Kate Smith
India’s cricket team is an aggressive and hard working team but the wins don’t add up to the amount of losses.
Could the key to a more constant and spectacular performance be in changing the team color from blue to another more helpful color?
If not blue then what color should India’s cricket team be? How do colors affect the ways people perform and interact?
Can a simple color choice or change enhance the outlook from just okay to amazing?
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Authored by Kate Smith
As reported by the The Korea Times
National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) plans to change the colors of the traditionally red fire engines and redesign the vehicles to give them a trendier look.
Fire engines in Korea have been uniformly colored red since the 1960s. However, there have been voices calling for authorities to replace the all-red fire vehicles with softer and brighter colors. Red is often associated with aggression or misfortune.
Some experts also point out that colors such as yellow or greenish-yellow are more visible to the human eye under dimmer conditions compared to red.
The agency is considering mixing red with another color, such as white, or completely replacing it with a brighter color, such as yellow or light green for the new-look fire engines.
Another idea is to have a different color according to the particular function of the vehicle, such as different colors for emergency vans and aerial ladder trucks.
“There is no principle that fire engines are supposed to be red. Many cities in Europe or North America have already adopted colors other than red for their fire engines,” said a NEMA official.
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As the color of our world grows bolder now splashing onto our MP3’s cell phones and Blackberries will the colors of our automobiles begin to follow?
Already carmakers are coming up with more trendy and enticing color names to attract all, from young to old, from laid back to sophisticate. Depending on the car and the audience colors such as Black Pearl and Cinnamon are popping up all over the automotive industry inspiring consumers to take a more personal interest in the style of coloring their automobile is wearing!
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Authored by Kate Smith
From the Chronicle Hearld, Nova Scotia, CA–
FINANCE MINISTER Michael Baker eschewed the traditional rose boutonniere on budget day Friday.
Instead, the minister greeted reporters wearing a hot-pink Gerber daisy on the lapel of his dark suit. Apparently he wasn’t so sure about the colour at first (the word we heard was mortified). But Mr. Baker was eventually convinced by Community Services Minister Judy Streatch and her policy adviser Ali MacLellan that it was the fashion-forward thing to do.
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Authored by Kate Smith
In an unprecedented move in the casual dining industry, T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants today became the first restaurant chain in the category to offer a variety of smaller portion entrees at lower prices all day, every day with its Right Portion, Right Price menu and they are using color to help hide the size difference.
In an article in the New York Times yesterday Richard Snead, head of the company that owns T.G.I. Friday’s and other restaurants shared that “The traditional portions are served in white bowls, with the smaller ones on plates that are about the same size, but red, which helps to mask the size differences.”
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American Apparel
customers have a new way to browse for products. Style Grid and Featured Style are now joined by Living in Color where customers can currently browse by either:..
RED , YELLOW , BLUE or PURPLE
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Non-artificial colourings is available in all colours - from yellow to orange, pink and green, even brown and black. The only colour missing from this list has been blue.
To meet this demand of consumers who are attaching greater importance to natural colourings, even in confectionery. Wild has developed a non-artificial blue colorant that it claims gives products a brilliant colour.
“Confectionery is all about colour,” said a spokesperson for Wild.
“Colourful sweets appeal to the predominantly young consumer, awaken the appetite and set the taste buds tingling.”
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