We know you love color so here's a way to bring that pop to work with some very colorful desk supplies. Why shouldn't your every day workspace be more fun?! Poppin gives you the chance to fix up your drab cubicle and turn it into a space that’s inspirational, more functional and much happier.

The Giveaway: An Entire Desk Top Set!

Poppin is giving away an entire Desk Top Set! You will have the option to mix it up or keep 'em all the same color if you wish.

Desk Top Set ($100+ Retail Value):

• In Boxes
• Desk Set (2 Pencil Cups and 2 Desk Trays)
• Tape Dispensers
• Stapler
• Staple Remover
• Scissors
• Rulers
• XXL Binder Clips
• Signature Pens
• Highlighters
• Calculator
• Small Soft Cover Notebook
• Medium Soft Cover Notebook

The Contest: Desk Set Color Hunt

Today through next Tuesday we're going to play a game and choose a random winner from the entries (in the comments). What you have to do:

2. 1.) Go to Poppin.com (there's also a search by color page)
3. 2.) Hunt for a 5-color palette entry. This means you must find FIVE (different) items you can combine in to a set.
4. 3.) Create a color palette for those five items on COLOURlovers.com (Basic | COPASO | FROM A PHOTO).
5. 4.) Post the images of the items and the palette in the comment section to this post.

EXAMPLE:

NEED HELP? Send me a Love Note me (mollybermea) if you do not know how to insert an image or the palette badge.

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Now here's to some fun poppin-ized desktops!

Poppin Colors:

You may use these colors as reference to create your palettes - just copy the HEX#.

Additionally, Poppin is giving you 15% OFF through Tuesday / Contest End, with code "COLOUR" at Poppin.com. Enjoy!

header credit:

HP is not involved with this giveaway contest

Designing promotional materials for print as a small business or freelancer can be daunting; but shouldn't be. With business cards, post cards, fliers and such - your canvas is small so keep it simple, direct and most of all - attention grabbing!

Apple has taken the clean white look (which has been copied over and over), your bank has taken the look using stock photos of "happy customers", your competitor is using "cute" clipart on their fliers... so what are you going to do to stand out? When your postcard turns up in the mail, what will keep your recipients attention?

source

Pop it with Pop Color.

Without getting in to too much detail of Pop Culture itself, I'm going to focus on color (of course). If you've learned anything from the color use of Pop Culture, it should be,"LOOK AT ME!!!"

Do not mistake Pop Color for simply tossing bright colors down to grab attention. Using Flourecents or Astrobrights will not cut it. Pop Color is a method that almost resists the rules of combination itself, but it works!

For example, Andy Warhol's famous Marilyn Monroe piece very marvelously displays a combination of colors that almost defy how colors should be used together - but it obviously grabbed attention.

Andy Warhol - Marilyn Monroe

So Let's Pop Your Print!

Keep the color palette minimal, bright and lusty or muted but defiant. It doesn't always have to be screaming with color, but make smart design choices.

Some of you may already know our own sec9586, some of you may have just heard of her as the designer of the Betabrand plaid pattern, "Betabrand2" in our contest, "Color a Plaid Shirt Contest by Betabrand + COLOURlovers". Either way, we're featuring her today so you can get to know her even better!

Shawna Crouch, aka "sec9586", is the owner / operator of CrouchDesign. She attended Murray State University, where she graduated with a BS in Studio Art/Graphic Design in 2009, and specializes primarily in print design. Along with her designing day job, she runs a small shop on Zazzle as CrouchDesign, where she offers freelance design services. She also has an Etsy shop,  AquaNetNightmare, set to reopen September 1st, 2011 which will offer jewelry, cards, invitations, stationary and drawings.

Shawna continually uses COLOURlovers in every which way for both work and fun. Let's take a peek at how she does it...

When it comes to your marketing arsenal as a businessperson, one of the greatest workhorses you have is your business card. From prospects to customers, your business card tells the world who you are and what you do. The question is: is it telling the story you want it to?

What Makes an Effective Business Card

What makes an effective business card has changed over time. In 2000, American Psycho taught us that clean, white or eggshell cards were the creme de la creme of business status symbols.

These days, people are turning to color as a way to stand out and be more memorable to contacts.

So, how do you choose when and where to use color or what color to use, for that matter?

There’s nothing quite like getting a new book; UPS knows me by my first name because I order so many! I woke up with this question this morning: is there a correlation between the color of a book’s cover, digital or physical, and its success within its genre? I took a look at several New York Times Bestseller lists to find out.

Bestselling Fiction

In the top 5 books in fiction, we see primarily copper, gold, silver, and ochre in spades and accents of lavender and bright blue. Granted, 3 of the 5 are from the same author, which might skew the results a bit, but nonetheless, warm colors and metallics rule the day for this genre. This makes sense as the 3 books by George R.R. Martin all deal with a world of royalty and opulence.

Bestselling Nonfiction

Of the five books present in the nonfiction category, we find a lot of warm colors, again. Here though, they are rich, non-metallic, and darker - much like the subject matter they enrobe. Looking at the covers, we see a range of colors from a memoir done up in nostalgic cream to a first person account of heaven wrapped in joyful yellow to a vibrant orange cover of a tale of scientific discovery. The two historical books in this genre are a sepia-toned look back World War II next to a similarly themed look at an American family’s time in Hitler’s Berlin.

The top selling nonfiction books show us, in color and in subject matter, that real life is a dizzying mix of dark and bright, grand and personal, recollective and modern.

Bestselling Hardcover Graphic Novels

Not quite as bold as comic books meant for children, the best selling graphic novels’ covers present us with a color palette of hues as dark and straightforward as the stories they portray. Whether looking at the modern yellow and gray of the newest X-Men novel or the dingy vintage orange of “Paying for It,” a seemingly seedy account of one man’s experience being a john, all the covers in this category allude to the grittier stories to be found in their pages.

Bestselling Children’s Chapter Books

Arguably the brightest covers of all those so far, it is appropriate that the top 5 children’s books give us saturated primaries, lapping flames, and bright lettering with only one black and white cover. The two books boasting primary colors deal with more simplistic subject matter while the flame-licked cover of “The Throne of Fire” sits squarely in the jewel-toned fantasy world where “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is well-served by the black and white of its cover, conjuring thoughts of long-lost mysteries yearning to be solved.

What color trends have you noticed in your book list, lovers? I’d love to compare notes.

Rise Above,
Stephan

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If you’re a big film, tv, or theatre buff, you’ve probably witnessed a fair amount of subtext. This principle can be applied to more than just those mediums though! Today, we explore how you use the lens of subtext to look at your website and improve your digital presence by uniting your color scheme with your actual text.

First though, what is subtext? Think about it as the underlying theme or message in a conversation. In film, it can be seen with lighting choices, costumes, a character’s body language and really anything that isn’t apart of the actual dialog. I’ll use the movie Jurassic Park as an example.

Business or fan pages on Facebook are becoming increasingly used by small businesses. They allow for exposure to prospective customers as well as continued communication to current clientele, so their popularity is pretty justified!

If you're looking to create a fan page for your small business, your best bet is to present a polished experience for your fans (and potential fans) by designing a landing page for your profile. It’s a chance for you to tell users what you’re about, what you’re doing on Facebook, and ultimately why they should “like” you. We had the pleasure of creating just such a page for our client, Sterling Finance Company.

There’s no doubt that it’s valuable, but creating that page also presents you with a number of variables to decide on. This post explores several solutions via our favorite topic at COLOURlovers: Color!

Like so many houses on so many home makeover shows, some business’ websites simply need a makeover. Getting a website redesign doesn’t mean that the business itself doesn’t deliver amazing work, they could even be the best in their industry, it just means they aren’t articulating it digitally...yet!

While there are many aspects to a successful makeover, the most important is color choice. Think back to those TV shows. Arguably the largest change in the house with a purple exterior and bright teal accents was the switch to mature, subdued pebble-tones accenting a calm, cool columbia blue. Or the living room done in carnation pink with lemon-yellow daisies transformed to buttercream trim on pale moss walls.

Whether dealing with a house or a website, color is the most visually transformative aspect of any makeover. While content, layout, and user experience are inextricably tied to great digital design (I can’t even begin to explain how important each of those are...), the use of color will be our focus today in examining digital metamorphoses.

From Craptacular to Banktacular!

When we were approached by Central Florida Postal Credit Union to give their brand and their site a facelift, we had our work cut out for us. After initial strategy meetings, we were able to suss out what they wanted their digital brand to say about them: CFPCU is reliable and caring. That meant that a visit to their site needed to be enjoyable, educational, and easy to navigate.

Unfortunately, their old site did not relay that clearly.

While the colors present aren’t the most clash-worthy I’ve ever seen (they’re simply a muted variation of primary colors), those colors say soft, calm harmony as opposed to trusted, attentive, and dependable.

There are some colors, when paired together, that just look good. They make sense, they match. There are also those colors which, put side by side, make your eyes burn. Ok, maybe not actually burn, but you know what I mean.

The question is: why? Why do certain color combinations look serene or exciting and others garish or completely boring? I want to explore the why of color combinations, some of the science and some of the psychology and how you, as a business person, can put those colors to work for you.

Covering Some Color Basics - Intro to Color Theory 101

Before we dive into the “why” of certain color schemes and how to use them to speak to your potential clients, let’s cover some color basics to make sure we’re all on the same page. COLOURlover pros and veterans, feel free to jump to the next section.

For the purpose of this post, I’ll be using the Red/Yellow/Blue color model as the primary colors on our subtractive color wheel (this subtractive wheel is what painters and artists use). For a look at the use of the Cyan/Magenta/Yellow color model used by printers, feel free to take a look at our recents posts discussing RGB versus CMYK conversions.

The Red/Yellow/Blue color model is what most of us grew up learning. Arranged in correspondence with the wavelengths of light, the original color wheel was invented by Isaac Newton. We wrote a complete history of the various color wheels recently, if you are curious and want to know more.

The color wheel that most are familiar with usually looks like this:

Secondary colors on this wheel are made by combining 2 primary colors. Likewise, tertiary colors are formed by mixing a primary and a secondary hue.

Source: Eva Williams

The logo design process is intriguing, both from the designer perspective and from a client’s point of view.  That said, it is a very different process depending on which vantage point you are looking from!

On the client side, I’m told the whole operation tends to go something like this:

• Meet with the designer
• Designer goes and does some “stuff”
• Poof! Logo options appear!
• If needed, meet with the designer again to go over any changes
• Designer does some more “stuff”
• Poof! I have a logo!

Well, COLOURlovers, I’d like to let you in on what that process looks like for your designer. Because, as any designer will tell you, we’d love to have logo creation be as simple as saying “Poof!” But, it’s a wee bit more difficult than that. I want to peel back the curtain to demystify how we move from a blank page to a logo that works on Blackberries, billboards, and business cards. Go ahead; you’re allowed to peek.

Step 1: Initial Consultation

When a client comes to us saying they need a logo designed, the first thing we do is sit down for an initial chat. In this earliest meeting, we aim to figure out what kind of logo they are looking for.

Do they simply want a logotype or a pictorial mark? How about something that combines both?