Package Design - September 2012 - 20

DIVING FOR
Design professionals forecast color selections and trends for packaging.
By Patrick Henry

PEARLS
A
computer monitor displays 16.7 million hexadecimal colors. A four-color printing press can build 10,000 to 20,000 colors from CMYK. The Pantone Goe color-speci cation system whittles the gamut down to the 2,058 colors that Pantone believes designers are most likely to ask for. But no matter how tightly it is compressed or how neatly it is systematized, color remains a thing of the creative imagination—subjective, esoteric and even a bit mysterious. Design pros often have different takes on color use and trends, but one thing all package designers can agree about is that no one can overstate the importance of color to the success of branded packaging. Kelly Kovack, partner and principal, Brand Growth Management, LLC, and chair of the beauty forecast committee, Color Association of the United States (CAUS), notes that color is “the only design element that can bypass the cognitive process” by appealing to action-triggering emotions. This is also taken as fact by Christine Ray, owner of Maximo Branding, who says (citing Lucas Conley’s Obsessive Branding Disorder as her source) that shoppers are willing to pay up to 200% more when their decision is based on emotion rather than reason. “That’s the way we design,” Ray says. It’s also why Tom Kane, design director at Murray Brand Communications, says it’s essential to make sure that the packaging has “a big chunk of color” to block the brand on the shelf and distinguish it from the competition.

Get it—then keep it
Choosing the right color also means preserving its visual integrity throughout all of the ways in which packaging color can be reproduced. Unwanted shifts in branded colors send equally undesirable vibes that confuse consumers and undermine brand identity, according to Ian Scho eld, vice president of sales and marketing, Sun Branding Solutions. The problem can be especially acute for global brands faced with keeping color consistent at production sites around the world. PantoneLive is offered as a universal reference base. The color service, operated by Pantone and X-Rite, is a cloud-stored repository of spectral color data from which brand owners, package designers and others can obtain digital swatches of the colors they are working with. The color de nitions, derived from many thousands of combinations of inks, substrates and printing processes, are said to enable brand owners and designers to reliably predict how their colors will look in actual production, with negligible variation from job to job. PantoneLive incorporates Sun

SEPTEMBER 2012

Package Design - September 2012

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