The point of most communication is to convey meaning. When faced with trying to convey simple or organized meaning from multi dimensional or dense information color can be a great aid in helping the reading grasp significance quickly.

Of course it can also be used to inflict pain in the wrong hands. In his brilliant book – Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte begins his discussion on the subject of color with this caution – “Above all, do no harm.”

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When using color to convey information I think it’s best to view it functionally rather than visually. There is no denying that blocks of black text on a white page are often the best way to convey large chunks of information and that careful use of colored text can help the reader meter how they consume the information.

Color used to convey information must have a purpose to be effective. With the advent of simple, low cost design tools we’ve all seen color used in a “look what I can make the font do” kind of way that, while perhaps attention getting, creates information pandemonium.

For this episode of Local Color John Jantsch interviews Pete Cowdin, one of the owners of The Reading Reptile, an award winning local children's bookstore located in the Brookside neighborhood of Kansas City, MO

In an industry that features giant superstores and margin crushing online sellers, The Reading Reptile stands out by offering an experience that is starkly different, visually stunning, and incredibly comfortable.

Everyone, regardless of job title, sells their ideas. Designers, sales folks, teachers, board members, and mangers must present and convince people just as effectively as professional public speakers.

While it may not feel like such a big deal to present an idea or innovation to a small group, millions of dollars may be on the line in even the most intimate of settings. Improving your ability to communicate your message by way of a formal presentation may be one of the most important personal development projects you can undertake.

As an author and speaker I’ve delivered hundreds of talks and created an equal number of slide decks. Below are my five best practices for creating presentations that make your message matter.

1) Start Analog

Like most people I used to fire up PowerPoint and start creating slide after slide. The problem with this approach is that you don’t see and feel the entire picture; you only get small chunks.

Now when I approach a presentation I start in analog mode with a giant white board that I’ve painted on a stretch of wall and several pack of post it notes. This allows me to see the entire map and add, subtract and rearrange ideas before I ever commit anything to presentation software. (While desktop presentation software like PowerPoint and Keynote are the norm, growing numbers are moving to online collaborative tools like SlideRocket.)

The effective use of color in design has a proven impact on readability, conversion and engagement both online and offline. Sometimes subtle changes in color for headlines and direct response cues can significantly increase a reader’s overall impression of the communication.

Color is shown to facilitate attention, recall, positive attitudes, perceived quality, and sales when compared to black and white. But, you knew that, or at least that’s one of the reasons you visit COLOURlovers so often.

The trick is the effective use of color in ways that can positively impact associations to your brand and draw the intended response.

Mood of Participation

Color is a mood enhancer, it’s so obvious when you look around this site and pay even a hint of attention to way your react to groups of colors.

There is a fine work by Shigenobu Kobayashi the founder and director of the Nippon Color and Design Research Institute called Color Image Scale that presents this idea of moods in color use and is a great starting place for discovering the impact or mood your color choices can send when used in association with your brand or simply to create a feeling in an ad or direct mail piece.

Understanding how to use this element alone can have a dramatic impact on gaining reader or prospect participation. But, don’t default to red for attention getting, the research also shows that black and white can outperform or equate to color when used to evoke the necessary reaction.

Landing Pages are Your Playground

Using color effectively in online landing pages is a great place to start your entire strategy and research for color use. A landing page is generally any online page where you send a prospect in response to an ad or specific offer of information. It has only one purpose and that’s to create an action – a sign-up, trial, subscription, purchase, etc.

Using color to help facilitate or repeat directional clues is often the best way to increase participation. Arrows and other hints may seem a bit cliché, but they are proven to increase participation.

Image credit: unbounce

Landing pages are such a great play ground for color use because you can test the impact of color or direction clues on conversion in near real time and use some of what you learn to inform your choices in other mediums or in ads and direct mail campaigns.

When it comes to color in landing pages there are four elements that should be tested rigorously. Using a tool such a Google Web Site Optimizer you create what are known as A/B tests that allow you to create two versions of a landing page (one with a blue headline and one with a green headline) to determine if one has more of the desired impact.

Image credit: unbounce

Common elements that benefit most from color are background, headline, core visual element and the “button” or call to action.

Background color can have a dramatic impact on the overall mood presented to the visitor and should coincide with the mood intended. By default this is an element that is ripe for testing.

Headlines often do the heavy lifting when it comes to grabbing the very short attention span of the reader. On top of containing a very compelling reason to read on subtle color variations have shown to cause dramatic upticks in conversion.

Effective landing pages and ads for that matter often rely on a core graphic or image to evoke an emotional response. These days that often includes video. Testing various images is very important.

If the primary purpose of a landing page is to get a response, then it must be painfully clear how to take the action. A big honking click here button outperforms a text link all day long, but red vs. orange or green vs. blue is something that must be tested.

Some of the best research on landing pages is coming out of unbounce. Read their ebook titled 101 Landing Page Optimization Tips or pick up Tim Ash’s Landing Page Optimization.

For this episode of Local Color we travel to Milwaukee Wisconsin, a beautiful Midwestern City on the shores of Lake Michigan. While Milwaukee has a vibrant sports, art and maritime history, let's face it, when it comes to Milwaukee most people think of beer. And nothing goes with a beer like a burger.

Meet Joe Sorge, founder of AJ Bombers. This local burger joint has created quite a brand and quite a business by embracing social media in ways that few restaurants have ever done.

I was first introduced to the term wayfinding from an architectural firm that hired me to help them get on the web years ago. In architectural terms wayfinding encompasses all of the ways in which people orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place.

While it can be a holistic and even philosophical design approach it mostly boils down to effective signage. When it comes to vast spaces, such as arenas and airports, color systems are often the most effective means of conveying categories of direction.

In other words, all blue signs refer to the International terminal or club section while all green signs signal restrooms. Frequently these systems also include icons to help further delineate or deepen the association.

Help Me Navigate a Space

The real point of the exercise boils down to making it easy for people to navigate in areas that are usually foreign to them.

When you think about it, a website is much like a large public space frequented by visitors that may not be familiar with the lay of the land. A system of color wayfinding might be very effective way to help visitors navigate a web site more effectively.

Effective marketing these days is more about teaching than selling. Every seasoned teacher will tell you that people learn and consume

information in different ways. Even within a narrowly defined, ideal target market there exists many different personalities and just as many different learning styles.

The problem this presents to the marketing folks is that you can no longer strive to create the brochure or web page, with stunning images and evocative stories, and hope to appeal to someone who is a “just the facts ma’am” kind of person.

The web has raised the bar and when a prospect goes out there online they expect to find lots of information, in a variety of formats, packaged for the way they want to consume it. Your marketing materials must come in many different flavors and offer something for every buying style.

I’ve always promoted something I call a marketing kit approach. This can pertain to online of offline materials because it’s as much about what the information is as how it’s presented. The idea behind the kit approach is that you create various forms of content to appeal to different needs.

There are a number of personality profile tools that validate the learning style theory and if you could just have each of your prospects and customers complete one of those for you life would be great.

You may never have that luxury, but you can learn from what these personality instruments teach about how to interact with different learning styles.

One of the more popular tools is called the DISC profile. You may have seen or taken the DISC profile. DISC is the four quadrant behavioral model based on the work of William Moulton Marston Ph.D. to examine the behavior of individuals in their environment or within a specific situation. DISC looks at behavioral styles and behavioral preferences.

DISC is an acronym for:

• Dominance – relating to control, power and assertiveness
• Influence – relating to social situations and communication
• Steadiness (submission in Marston’s time)- relating to patience, persistence, and thoughtfulness
• Conscientiousness (or caution, compliance in Marston’s time) – relating to structure and organization

My take on this when it comes to marketing materials is that different behavioral styles need different marketing messages and forms of communication and content.

In our marketing kit example a

• D – needs the facts, the quick rationalization of benefit that a case statement might make, case studies too
• I – loves a good story, relates to more classic marketing messages of difference, loves images
• S – likes volume of content, frequency and consistency of content and message, full feature dumps, white papers
• C – responds to FAQs, testimonials, case studies – proof, checklists

Also consider that nobody is strictly a high D or high I, we’re all made up of mixtures.

Create lots of marketing content, package it in different formats (including audio and video) and offer it up for all to consume, knowing that how it’s consumed will differ from prospect to prospect.

For this episode of local color we are traveling to Dallas Texas home of football, cowboys and cattle. Now, craft sewing and hip might not always be two terms you toss into the same conversation, but that may change when you meet Callie Work-Leary the under 30 owner of CityCraft – a Fabric Boutique and Sewing Lounge she hopes to build into the Crate & Barrel of the sewing world.

Hip Sewin' from Library

There are so many great tools out there online these days that a person could power their entire business using nothing but free and low cost web apps.

One area that has seen tremendous advancement is the area of online applications geared towards helping people do all things related to graphic design. For some, the days of buying software suites that cost more than the most robust desktop computer may be coming to an end.

Below is a list of some of the most popular online offerings that address design, illustration and editing, including crowdsourcing of custom design.

Corporate branding agencies have long valued the creation and use of Corporate Branding Standards Guides, or something lofty sounding like that. The idea behind the tool, often created as 400 page, richly illustrated books, was to communicate all the ways that the identity elements associated with the brand could and could not be used. This workhorse is often used by internal and external sources alike.

While I believe this has always been an essential item for even the smallest of firms, the web has certainly made the creation, scaling and communication of such a tool more affordable and less challenging.

While your branding standards guide may not need to be as elaborate as, say Apple, you should carefully consider and document the correct use of your identity elements in an effort to maintain consistency in all uses. I've seen two person firms struggle with using the same colors throughout basic stationary. Your style guide will help reinforce the proper use internally and act as a simple way to communicate standards to designers, printers and t-shirt shops.

I also believe a standards manual says that you think your brand is important and that's a message that will serve your culture well as you grow your brand.

You can make your guide as elaborate or casual as fits, but keep it simple and up to date and build it on the web.

Some of the more common elements you to consider addressing are: