What every entrepreneur needs to know about Trade Marks

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Ruth

TRADE MARKeting

Trade marks are everywhere. People, as consumers, are exposed to hundreds of marketing messages every day. It has been estimated that the average London commuter, in one 45 minute journey is exposed to more than 130 adverts. You can guarantee that 99.9% of these adverts will contain a trade mark of some description. Not to mention the trade marks that might appear on that commuter’s clothing, on the mp3 player he is listening to, on the cards in his wallet, in the shape of the bottle of juice he is carrying, in the newspaper he is reading… you get the picture.
A trade mark is primarily an indication of source. So they are important because they help a business to protect the brand and reputation it has built up in relation to the goods or services it provides, by giving them certain rights over that mark. They also protect your customers by helping them to avoid confusion and make informed purchasing choices, or to put it another way, making sure that your customers know where to come back to time after time to purchase your fabulous (naturally!) product or service.

Registerable marks
A trade mark can consist of any word, logo, symbol, slogan, colour per se, design, three dimensional shape, sound or even in theory smell which is used to identify and distinguish the goods or services of one manufacturer or merchant from the goods and services of others.

Some famous examples of these different types of trade marks instantly spring to mind. The word “CocaCola,” the Nike “swoosh” logo, the slogan “Have a break. Have a Kit-Kat!” the shape of a Toblerone bar and Nokia’s famous original ring tone as used in Trigger Happy TV are all examples of registered trade marks.
A trade mark must always be registered together with a list of the goods and/or services that it is intended for the mark to be used on. Thus it is possible for the same mark to be used by different proprietors for different goods, hence the existence of trade marks for PENGUIN for biscuits and PENGUIN for books.

Unregisterable marks
Marks or terms cannot be registered if they are:

• Descriptive of the goods and/or services, or their quality, quantity, intended purpose, geographical origin or other characteristic. (for example OXFORD SOAP for soap made in Oxford)
• Not distinctive (e.g. no inherent distinctiveness such as “$”)
• Generic in current language or the relevant trade (for example, ESCALATOR was originally a trade mark but has now become generic)
• Deceptive (for example the word KASHMEER for clothing which is not made of cashmere)
• Immoral or contrary to public policy
• Specially protected emblems (for example the Royal Coat of Arms)
• For three dimensional shape marks only – shapes which are typical of the goods themselves, shapes which are functional and shapes which add substantial value to the goods.
• Already registered by somebody else for the particular goods and services in question.
It is best to select a “strong” trade mark if possible, which has no descriptive meaning at all. Good examples are invented terms such as EXXON, KODAK and XEROX. Or alternatively, choose a trade mark with no meaning in relation to the particular goods and services, for example APPLE for computers, or PICASSO for cars. The rationale behind this is that terms which are descriptive should be kept free for all traders to use.

Why you should register your trade mark
You may have a unique or distinctive name which sets your business apart. You may spend a significant amount of money, time and effort building up a brand and a reputation associated with that mark. Not registering your trade mark puts your business at risk from dilution of your brand value by others, loss of goodwill or worse loss of business to others. As the saying goes, if it is worth copying, then it is worth protecting. Here are some other reasons why it is worth registering your trade mark:

• Prevent others from taking advantage of the goodwill you have built in your mark, without the need to demonstrate Passing Off
• The early bird catches the worm – trade mark registration systems are based on a first-to-file principle, so if someone registers the mark you want before you do, there is very little that you can do about it.
• Protection for the lifetime of your business – a trade mark can be kept alive indefinitely, provided that it is renewed every 10 years
• Value for money – registering a trade mark is relatively inexpensive, compared to other forms of registered IP protection
• Commercialisation – trade marks can be sold, licensed, or used as security for a debt
• Brand building – registering a trade mark provides a solid and protectable foundation upon which to build a brand and a reputation for a business.
The need to maintain, monitor and enforce your trade mark
Registering your trade mark is the big first step, but for best value a trade mark owner should manage, monitor and enforce its rights.
• Mark your trade mark as such – use TM or ®
• Don’t assume because you have registered a particular company name or domain name that you will have trade mark rights to the name; this is not the case.
• Use your mark as a trade mark and make sure others do too or you risk it becoming a generic term – YO-YO and ASPIRIN are examples. “Googling” has now become a verb, with the term in common parlance among both consumers and the trade. However, Google’s legal team constantly battle and monitor use of their trade mark to prevent it from becoming generic – e.g. monitoring content in the press and ensuring that any dictionary entries for Google show its trade mark status.

How to register your trade mark
Trade Marks are national rights and need to be registered in each territory of interest. An important exception is the availability of an EU-wide trade mark registration – the Community Trade Mark (CTM), which covers all 27 member states.
Consulting a specialist (e.g. trade mark or patent attorney) to assist you with the process and ensure appropriate protection is always advisable. It is possible for you to file your own applications online at www.ipo.gov.uk (UK) or www.ohim.eu (for CTMs). Your trade mark should be filed with the chosen goods and services specified. Once published, an opportunity is provided for third parties to oppose or it proceeds to registration. In the UK, the whole process can be completed in about 3 months.

by Donna Trysburg, from Ellis IP, ask Donna or Michael Ellis about IPSure – a new service for startups providing entry level access to professional IP services. You can also read more about Intellectual Property with reference to the technology industries is this article by Michael here.

What’s in a name?

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Ruth

Why company names are important for brand building

The naming of your company is something people really do worry a lot about when establishing a new brand, and for good reason. Once your name is established it’s really hard to change, you’ve got it for life.

Entrepreneurs often start in the wrong place, they want a name that ‘sounds good’ without considering the meaning behind the name, which is far more important than the word itself. Obviously there are some basic considerations to think about; you don’t want to offend anyone, and you don’t want a name no-one can pronounce! If you think you might expand abroad then it’s worth considering meanings in other languages and cultures. But, as with anything brand related it all starts from the fundamentals. What is it that you are offering of value to your customers? How is that different from what other people are offering? What’s the best way to build emotional connections with your audience to build belief and trust? During this process you have to force yourself to think from the customer’s perspective. It’s all too easy to get wrapped up in your own vision and forget what this will mean to other people. It’s useful to get an outside perspective on this when you are working it out, even a friend who’s not connected to your business if you can’t afford professional help.

Getting noticed online
The more unique the word you choose for your name, the easier it will be to get a high rank if people search for it, BUT, if this is to work, they need to know your name to start with! To get google to rank you highly on terms that are descriptive, like ‘plumbing’ or ‘business consultant’ it helps a lot if you have these words in your name. We did very well with the name of our last business, d3o, because we had a huge amount of press who were all talking about us on the web, and linking to us. Plus people in our market soon got to know us, so when they searched for our name (even if they got it slightly wrong), we’d be at the top, but if you’re struggling to get people to know about you in the first place, a more descriptive name might help. But, beware; imagine if you called your brand ‘Devon Cotton Cushions’. Whilst this would be great for someone looking for that on google, can you imagine how many people are searching for that term every day? The only reason Apple score so highly is because of their size, as a startup with a generic name, you’ll really struggle getting on the first page. So the answer depends on what you are trying to achieve, what your website is for, and your overall business strategy. The best approach from a search point of view is somewhere between unique and descriptive.

Trade mark
Secondly, however much you like the simplicity of the name ‘Devon Cotton Cushions’ you wouldn’t be able to protect it with a trade mark because it’s a descriptive term. Here’s more on this from Donna Trysburg of Ellis IP (www.ellis-ip.co.uk)

A trade mark can consist of any word, logo, symbol, slogan, colour per se, design, three dimensional shape, sound or even in theory smell which is used to identify and distinguish the goods or services of one manufacturer or merchant from the goods and services of others.

Marks or terms cannot be registered if they are:

Descriptive of the goods and/or services, or their quality, quantity, intended purpose, geographical origin or other characteristic. (for example OXFORD SOAP for soap made in Oxford)
Not distinctive (e.g. no inherent distinctiveness such as “$”)
Generic in current language or the relevant trade (for example, ESCALATOR was originally a trade mark but has now become generic)
Deceptive (for example the word KASHMEER for clothing which is not made of cashmere)
Immoral or contrary to public policy
Specially protected emblems (for example the Royal Coat of Arms)
For three dimensional shape marks only – shapes which are typical of the goods themselves, shapes which are functional and shapes which add substantial value to the goods.
Already registered by somebody else for the particular goods and services in question.

It is best to select a “strong” trade mark if possible, which has no descriptive meaning at all. Good examples are invented terms such as EXXON, KODAK and XEROX. Or alternatively, choose a trade mark with no meaning in relation to the particular goods and services, for example APPLE for computers, or PICASSO for cars. The rationale behind this is that terms which are descriptive should be kept free for all traders to use.

We’ll be hearing more from Donna in a future post on things to consider when trade marking your name and products.

Your brand’s heart and soul
A great example of how your name can really define your direction from the beginning came from a recent talk I attended where the founder of the famous Brighton Choccywoccydoodah chocolate and cake shop talked about her startup experience. Any SEO expert would probably have told you that this name was crazy, and the other alternative “The Chocolate Factory” would have been much more appropriate (although Ellis IP would surely have preferred the more unique version).

The name for the shop came after a late night chocolate eating session over a bottle of gin whilst trying to solve a problem. They had just leased the space next door to their then popular café wanting to expand, and had just heard from the council that they’d rather it remained a shop, oh dear. So, with no money and a shop, but no idea what to sell, they decided to open a chocolate shop. At the end of the bottle of gin, they had settled on choccywoccydoodah as the best name, and they went for it; the rest, as they say, is history.

This is a great story itself, but during this talk, Christine was asked what she thought would have happened if they’d stuck with the sensible ‘Chocolate Factory’ name? She replied that she believed they would be nowhere. The irreverence in the name was and still is at the centre of their brand. It defines everything that they do, every decision they make; it’s what differentiates them and gives their brand a heart and soul. So sometimes the sensible option isn’t always the best!

So as you can see, there are many things to consider when naming your company, and it’s really quite an important decision, so make sure you’ve given it adequate thought.

How to deliver your story on Facebook

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Ruth

Whether you’re starting up a new page or you’re an old timer, these tips will help you to make your Facebook page as effective as possible.

Design
You don’t have complete control over every element of a Facebook page’s design, but there are some areas that can be optimised.

It’s not very well known that you’re not restricted to a square profile image; you can do some really clever things with the profile picture. If you try to use an image that’s too large, it will be resized. However, you can actually have an image that’s 200 pixels wide by 600 pixels high before Facebook will try to resize it. What you need to bear in mind is that when your posts appear in a newsfeed, your profile picture is displayed as a thumbnail. The thumbnail uses a 200px x 200px square, and you can specify what it will be so make sure that a 200×200 square of your entire 600×200 image will be useable and clear as a thumbnail
You can also use a welcome default page (tab) that visitors will see when they first arrive on your Facebook page. You can use this area to promote a current campaign, encourage people to ‘like’ your page, or you can even integrate your Facebook page with your MailChimp account to create an email sign up form. These default landing tabs from Skittles and Coca-Cola show what can be achieved

Content

How are you going to get your content noticed?

Consider your language you use when you write any posts on your Facebook page. Write in a clear but convincing way – be an expert in your field and explain how your product/service/campaign helps your reader to solve a problem
Be direct. Refer to your reader as ‘you’ – talk directly to them
Use a call to action where possible
Post links to take people to relevant content on your website
Reward your fans for supporting your Facebook page by posting exclusive content, stories, discounts – whatever, just make it something they’ll get there first or won’t get anywhere else
Encourage fans to get involved in your page by commenting on your posts. Try setting up a poll to ask their opinion on a (relevant) timely topic. Ask them to share your post so their friends see it
Update your page regularly. A Facebook page that hasn’t been updated since Christmas is not going to attract new fans
Strengthen relationships by responding to comments quickly

Promotion

Find other pages that compliment yours, perhaps in the same industry or in the same city and ‘like’ them
This allows you to write content on their pages and comment on their posts which automatically generates a link back to your own page
Write a blog post about your Facebook page (if it’s brand spanking new)
Place a Facebook widget or button on your website
Put a link to your page on your personal Facebook profile
Include links in your email signature and in your email marketing

Amy Rutter, Zero G Media

What’s more important for a startup, passion or knowledge?

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Ruth

©Choccywoccydoodah

There are many skills an entrepreneur needs to survive the startup world. Clearly the two above are both extremely important, but when the chips are down, which one is most likely to carry you through the hard times and out the other side?

Without some business knowledge, you’re not going to get very far, but more importantly, without the ability to LEARN, you’ve failed before you’ve begun. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, or starting a business for the first time, you’re bound to come across hurdles you haven’t experienced before. You’re never going to know everything, so, point 1, so be prepared to keep your mind wide open to new knowledge and be mindful of your own gaps.

Secondly, every great entrepreneur knows how to get the best people on his or her team to fill those gaps. We all know Richard Branson is a great front man with tons of ideas, but he himself admits he’s not the right person to handle the numbers, by his own admission he’d probably just do every interesting project that came along! So it’s o.k. to have weaknesses, or a lack of knowledge, as long as you recognise where your weaknesses lie.

Passion on the other hand, can’t be outsourced. You as an entrepreneur are the spark behind the nuts and bolts of the machine. It’s your job to inspire and lead the direction of your new company, to pick people up and spur them on when they’ve run out of energy, or lost focus. To keep this life-blood full of oxygen, and to maintain your enthusiasm when it’s all getting a bit tough, you obviously have to love what you are doing, and really believe in it. If you haven’t got passion for your business, why should anyone else? If you can’t summon up the energy to solve another problem, then how can you inspire others to do the same? Before long, I’d put money on you giving up and going back to the day job.

Let me tell you a little story to illustrate the power of passion over knowledge. I went to a talk recently run by Brighton Chamber of Commerce, where local entrepreneur Catherine Taylor, co-founder of Choccywoccydoodah, the fantastic fantasy chocolate and cake chocolaterie, gave a talk about her startup experience. The two co-founders moved to Brighton looking for an easy life by the sea, as many do. They thought they’d open a café, because that would be easy (they were in for a shock), they didn’t know anything about the catering business, and had never run any kind of business themselves before. The café did really well, the pair were very entertaining, they loved running the café, and were equally loved by all the locals. But, they weren’t making any money; they needed more space to put more bums on seats. The space next door was up for grabs, so they grabbed it, only to find after they had signed the lease that the council weren’t keen on the change of use, and wanted to keep it as a shop. Oh dear, they thought, they knew nothing about running a shop, didn’t have anything to sell in it, or any money to turn it into a shop anyway. So, over a bottle of gin that night, they pondered what to do. Christine said to her co-founder, also a Christine, “if you were to have the key to any shop in the world, what would it be? To which the other Catherine replied “duh, a chocolate shop of course!” So, by the end of the bottle of gin, they had coined the name for the café, rejecting the more conservative option of ‘The Chocolate Factory’ and were on their way to creating a global brand for the most amazing chocolate creations. They spent every evening building the shop themselves, (the bank wouldn’t give them any money because of their lack of ‘knowledge’) and sought help from friends and customers to source the amazing chocolate to sell in the shop. That was about 25 years ago, now they’re just opening a shop in London, have launched a Global TV show, sell 7,500 cakes a year, all out of their 300 square foot shop space; a very strong brand. Now that’s the power of passion over knowledge.

So as you can see, my money is firmly on the side of passion, but also an open mind and the ability to learn. What do you think?

How your LinkedIn company page can help with SEO

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Ruth

If you don’t yet have a company page for your business on LinkedIn, what are you waiting for? Get one!

Not only is a company page great for pushing out your messages and advertising your services, but it will also really help with your website’s search engine optimisation – after all, you want your website to rank well in search engine results.

Follow these steps to effectively employ LinkedIn for SEO:

Keywords
Be thorough in completing the overview and services sections and include as much information as applicable to your business. Include your company locations, business description, company specialties, industry and use the status update feature. Not only will a bulky profile help users understand your business offerings immediately, but the information you provide will also make it easier for users to find your business. Use keyword-rich text within the text areas – think about the types of words users might search for to find you.

Advertise vacancies
Use the Careers tab to advertise your job openings. Job listings appear in search results and on Twitter, increasing your visibility across the web. If someone follows your company directly it’ll also show up in their news feed.

Link with employees
Ask your employees to include a link to your company page from their personal profiles. They do this by adding the company as their current employer. Everything that they’ve written about their role at the business on their profile will act as content and keywords which link to your business. Again, this will help with optimisation.

Connect with your blog posts
Join up your company page with your website so that all your blog posts automatically appear on your LinkedIn company page feed. The links that they’ll generate that will take users through to your website will support SEO.

Testimonials
Request recommendations for your services. This not only is very effective as it serves as a form of ‘word of mouth’ marketing, but also the mere act of someone recommending your product or service generates a link in the activity feed of that person’s profile which links to your company page.

External link
Put simply, your LinkedIn business presence is another valuable platform that acts as an external site to direct people to your website.

Guest post by Amy Rutter of Zero G Media

Storytelling through video, some advice from Larchmont Films

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Ruth

So why do you want to make a video?

Possible Reasons:

Raising profile?
Explaining who you are and what you do?
Building your brand?
Making sales?
Driving people to your site?
Making people laugh?
Making people think?

After identifying the reasons, we now need to strip this down to a few key ideas to focus on – too many ideas may confuse the main message, so try to keep it down to about 2 or 3 concepts. It’s very effective for big projects, but also advisable if you’re just starting out.

B. How?

So you’ve decided what you want to achieve – now it is a question of how to get your message across.

Try to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Force yourself to think about your message from the perspective of the customer. What do they know about your product/service? What do you need them to know? What’s the No.1 issue your customer has that your product/service solves? What is your company’s USP? What does it do the best?

The South Coast Bikes film from Larchmont Films is a good example of communicating their core message instantly:

Never stop asking the obvious questions. Never stop being curious, always take it to the next level:

Level 1 – we save you time – how?
Level 2 – by making your match day bookings easier – how?
Level 3 – because we have more people working in a call centre/better computer systems – how?
Level 4 – because we reinvest more in customer care because we care more than our competitors.

See how each journalistic line of enquiry has taken the story on, and is developing it in a focused and clear way. Those three or so points and only those points, should be the focus of the video. Don’t try and put everything in. Less is more.

Love this quote from the French Philosopher Pascal who wrote a series of letters known as The Provincial Letters. He ended one letter with the line:

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”

So what we’ve done, perhaps without you noticing, is get started on the story-telling process. All good videos tell a story. And you need to tell your audience a story. People learn from story-telling. They also remember stories better than lists of facts. So far we have the basis for the story. Now we need to look at who is going to tell this story.

C. Whose story is it anyway?

There’s no one way to tell your story, it is always about adapting the approach to the audience you are trying to reach.

Sometimes a different story is required for a different audience depending on how new your company is and how developed your brand is. But there are some simple guidelines that will help you mould and shape it for nearly all contexts. Who is going to tell your story? Who is your character?

Make sure they can deliver on screen with passion. It may be that you have no choice – the CEO casts himself. No matter how boring, try and find a human element to what they do. Keep it short and use other ways to convey the majority of the message.

Alternatively think about using a combination of first-hand customer testimonials, and testimonies from company employees. Something that connects them with the audience. The golden rule here is that the best testimonials will always be delivered by people who are both engaging & believable. In business-to-business communications you could also argue, the more expert they are in their field the more seriously the message will be taken. With testimonials, one idea could be to use a case study from a happy customer.

How they had great success using your product/service might be a way to structure a film:

What was the customer’s problem/dilemma she was looking to solve?
Why did she try your product/service?
What happened as a result of that?

Voice-over

Can depend on budget whether you want to shell out on a third person voice-over
Can lift a film if choose the right voice
Can bring an extra layer of humour or empathy
Can convey authority.

Brevity

Don’t be afraid to keep it short – everyone’s busy and time is precious.
Short films with good quality/content garner most views, links and comments.
Draw people in.

Try to emotionally engage with people.

A really good example of the final point is this video from Larchmont Films, which White Hat Media plans to use on its new website:

And a bad example is this one – promoting the new Green Deal – which is longer than it should be:

D. Picture this

Wherever possible show rather than tell. Showing is always better than telling especially as we are working in a visual medium. The dating analogy – some people will say they have a GSOH whilst others will tell an amusing story. Who are you more likely to think is funny?

So don’t tell us about the new heavy-duty motor you put in your vacuums. Show us your vacuum sucking up heavy ball bearings from the thickly carpeted floor. Keep it relevant. Nobody cares how proud you are of the entrance to your new company headquarters. Unless that gorgeous sign over your door helps your customer in some way – leave it on the cutting room floor.

Here’s an example of a corporate film about the Sussex Innovation Centre that could have had a better visual start:

Quality versus Homespun.

Once again, I think this really depends on who your audience is, what you are trying to say to them and how developed your brand is. This ALDI ad is very short and as a result probably not that expensive to produce, but it works because ALDI is such a developed brand:

You see amateur videos everywhere, they get thousands of views on platforms like YouTube and no one seems to care about the quality. If you run a T-shirt company or a small cupcake shop then maybe a semi-rough, unprofessional video is just what you need. A home made, simple video might work perfectly for a lot of small businesses. But beware – a video says a lot about your company.

A good video shows confidence, care, success. If your video is poorly lit, badly scripted, shot or hard to hear or understand – it could make a company look amateurish. You cannot redo a first impression.

So if you sell software, IT services, or healthcare-related products or services – or you want to sell to companies much bigger than yours, take care to make the right impression – the last thing you want to do is look like the kid on YouTube who plays air guitar in his bedroom.

Conclusions

“One of the most important lessons to be learned by any communicator (and one of the most easily forgotten) is that you don’t instruct people to do something – you inspire them.”

John Hegarty, Turning Intelligence Into Music

Follow that advice and you’ll never go far wrong.

©Philip Berman, Larchmont Films, Brighton 2012

Video marketing isn’t just for the big boys

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Ruth

If you think you always need a big budget to make a video, oh you’d be wrong.

Sure, if you want some swish production that looks like it’s been made in Hollywood, you will need a Hollywood budget. But depending on your business and its aims, you may well be able to put one together yourself. And that doesn’t need to be as scary as it sounds. A charity, for example, could really benefit by employing the shaky home-made look. You don’t want it to look like you’ve spent all your donations on making the video, right?

Equipment
So for starters you need a digital camera. Or depending on what you’re going for, a webcam or the camera on your phone might do the job – in fact, that might suit the job in hand better. Say you want to film a video of your live event. You can do it on your mobile phone using an app like Qik and get it streamed to Twitter immediately.

If you want to do any form of editing – trimming and cutting clips, adding title sequences, playing with the audio and so on, you will need some editing software. Your budget option is Microsoft Movie Maker or iMovie which come ready installed on your computer. Spend a bit of time figuring it out and you may even find simple editing enjoyable.

Content
The first thing you need to think about is why you’re making a video. What do you want to say, how do you want to say it and what do you want to achieve? Do you hope to be portrayed as a fun team who knows their stuff but has a laugh at the same time, or do you have a serious message to convey? Always bear in mind your target audience. This will vastly affect the style of video that you need to make.

Video enhances a corporate identity – much like all content you produce – so make sure it’s in line with your branding and follows your established tone of voice.

The nature of video is infectious as it generates the kind of viral behaviour that text can’t. There are certain styles that will help with this: if your video is funny, challenging, gripping or there’s a sexual (non-pornographic) tone. If you can capture the viewer’s attention in some way, you’ve got them. And they’re much more likely to share it with their friends.

Pushing it out
Firstly, you need yo get your video uploaded to video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo (businesses need to open a Vimeo PRO account for commercial use).

Use the generated code to embed the video on your website or in blog posts
Email it out to your email marketing subscribers
Upload it to your Facebook company page (and if relevant, your personal profiles), tweet about it on Twitter (possibly setting up a hashtag in the process), and post it on your LinkedIn company page and Google+ page
Ask friends, fans and followers to pass your video on
Post it in industry-relevant and topic-relevant groups and forums
Stick a link in your email signature
You could even embed the video on the front page of your website

Good luck and have fun!

This blog was kindly contributed by Amy Rutter from our Digital partners Zero G Media

How to build harmonious colour palettes

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Ruth

In the previous post we saw how important colour was to evoking the right emotions. But how do you build colour palette that works harmoniously from a design point of view?

A lot of this comes intuitively to a designer so we tend to forget the basic rules, so here is a reminder for all those who have forgotten, and some insight into how to get this right for those who aren’t so creatively inclined.

What do I mean by harmony? Harmonious colours (and any kind of harmony for that matter) are seen to create order, to avoid being either boring or chaotic. Harmonious colours make us feel good and draw us in, unharmonious colours make us feel bad, or confused and push us away.

Colour harmony has two ingredients: similarity and contrast which involves picking harmonious colours that are in the right ‘families’, then making decisions on hue, value and saturation to achieve contrast between them.

Similarity
Colour is broken down into primary (red, yellow, blue) secondary (orange, green, purple) and tertiary (yellow-orange, red-violet, blue-green, red-orange, blue-violet, yellow-green). Add white to these colours and you get tints, add black and you get shades, and add gray and you get tones.

The most basic harmony is made up of the primary colours and any combination of tints, shade or tones (which quickly gets to quite a lot of combinations if you think about it). Then you have the same thing with the secondary colours, and Tertiaries, which is actually an astounding amount of possible colour palettes already.

You can also play with analogous harmonies, which are made from those colours that sit next to each other on the colour wheel, up to about 5 colours and all their tints, shades and tones.

You will all have heard of complimentary colours, those opposite each other on the colour wheel, e.g. purple and yellow. You can also experiment with split complementaries. These are made by taking a colour on the wheel, say yellow, then looking for the opposite colour, which would be purple, but instead of choosing purple, you pick the 2 colours either side of it (red-violet and blue-violet) – these colours and all their tints, shades and tones will be harmonious with each other.

Tetratic harmonies are derived by drawing a rectangle on the colour wheel, and are essentially 2 pairs of complementary colours. This would result in, for example, a red, orange-yellow, green and blue-green combination. You can do the same thing but place a square on your colour wheel to reveal an alternative set of harmonious colours.

There is something called divergent harmonies too, but that’s a bit too complicated to explain without a diagram, and I think that already gives you plenty to be going on with, google it if you’re curious!

Contrast
As well as the actual colour combinations, you also need to consider the intrinsic colour values (how light or dark they are) and how they affect each other. If you go from yellow through to purple in the spectrum, the values go from low to high. When putting together harmonious palettes, think about how your colors contrast with each other, how does the value of one solid colour relate to a tint of another? How to the colours interact with each other positively or negatively? If you put a light colour on a dark background for example, it will look lighter than if it appears on white. The same is true of saturated and unsaturated colours, a dull colour will enhance a more saturated one when side by side; this is called simultaneous contrast. Lighter colours will also appear larger and darker ones smaller, and if colours with similar values (lightness) are used side by side, they will appear to blend.

Fascinatingly, 2 colours side by side will also actually change the perception of each other in a predictable way, this gets a bit complicated so concentrate! Say for example you were designing a double page spread; one side was bright yellow, and the other bright red. The yellow page would appear to be tinted by the colour that is complimentary to red, so the yellow page would be tinted slightly green, as green is opposite to red on the colour wheel.

There’s a lot to remember here, but if you are struggling with colour combinations on a project, it’s worth stepping back and thinking about this. Print yourself out a colour wheel (feel free to use mine) and have a play with these tried and trusted methods and you’ll probably get yourself back on the right track!

Colour – it’s been emotional

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Ruth

Our relationship with colour goes way back, and it changes over time, did you know blue was for girls and pink was for boys until about 100 years ago? Pink was considered a stronger colour whilst blue was considered daintier, and was associated with the Virgin Mary, and therefore perceived as more appropriate for girls.

Colour is so important in communicating your brand that companies have even trade marked their signature colours. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with it’s famous purple, Heize’s baked bean turquoise. Apple demonstrated how important colour can be in changing a brand’s perception, first by bringing our their iMacs in delicious colours, now seen on the multitude of iPods now glowing in the temples that are the apple stores. Research by the Institute for Colour Research revealed that people make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or product within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on colour alone.

So, colour is important, but why is this? Colour enables recognition and memory, attracts attention and acts as a visual aid to guide the eye around a page. One of the biggest and the most fundamental reason though is that it evokes emotion, and whether you like it or not, our decisions are made based mainly as a result of our emotional reactions, not logic. After carrying out a study proving this at University College London, Bernedetto De Martino commented “the brain stores emotional memories of past decisions, and those are what drive people’s choices in life.”

Our emotional reactions are closely connected to our experiences – our childhood memories of candyfloss, the seaside, the yellow-tinted hues of old photographs, these colour palettes transport us to a different place. Some of these associations we share collectively, and some are individual to our own experience. Therefore associations change depending on where you had those experience and any colour languages you have been taught through your culture. For example red can mean danger, passion, purity, death, mourning, vitality, and marriage, depending on where you’re from. There is a great summary of colour and meanings across continents that provides a really useful guide on this here http://bit.ly/colourbyculture.

Age and gender make a difference too, according to a report by Leslie Harrington PhD and Anat Lechner PhD, younger people see orange as more peaceful, and older people associate more positive emotions with red and purple. Red, yellow and orange were seen more negatively by men, whilst black was viewed more positively. The report doesn’t speculate as to why this might be, and it seems like no one really knows, but in my view the most likely reason is that it’s a mixture of context and experience.

As no one really knows why we feel why we do about colour, my advice would be to focus on context. What do you want your audience to feel? This should be heavily linked to your brand strategy. When I’m developing a brand story for a new company, we pick 3 emotions we want to evoke in our audience; this should drive the colour choice. When we’re talking about colour, I try to make connections with things in the real world that make me feel how I want the audience to feel, and let this lead the palette. For example, we all know natural colours are calming, and this is because they bring our minds back to simple things that have been around for eternity and will still be here, relatively unchanged after we’ve gone. They bring back the perspective to our lives, which is very therapeutic. So if I want to evoke these emotions in my audience, this is where I’ll look. I love design-seeds.com for this because it takes reference from nature and man-made found objects, and pulls beautiful harmonious colour palettes out of them.

Altering reality

Colour can be used to completely distort perspective, as is fantastically demonstrated in the work of Felice Varini, who paints geometric shapes onto spaces that change your perception of the space and the object painted within it, depending on where you view it from: www.varini.org

By manipulating the rods and cones in your eyes, you can use the after image effect, (the visual distortion you get when you stare at one solid colour then look at a white wall and you see the opposite colour on the colour wheel). The Lilac Chaser demonstrates this very well whilst also adding motion into the equation, making colours completely disappear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilac_chaser. This video on New Scientist shows another way you can trick the brain using colour and motion, this won the best illusion of the year contest http://bit.ly/colourmotionillusion.

So as designers, there’s obviously a lot to think about when picking your colours for your next project, and a huge amount of opportunity to manipulate reality! There are some excellent places now online that can help you with this process, for example, the aforementioned design-seeds.com, colourscheme.com, colourlovers.com has loads of tools, you can even upload a photo and their photocopa software will pull out a colour palette from it. Pinterest.com lets you create visual mood-boards in a really intuitive way, providing an easy way to build a colour board online that’s shareable. There are thousands of places and people predicting the colour trends based on all sorts of factors, from the economy, human behaviour and crowd-sourced trend-spotting, but one place to have a look at some free colour trend info is here: http://www.colourfutures.com/ and if you want to try your hand at injecting some illusion into your work, colourlovers has some good inspiration: http://bit.ly/colourloversillusions

If you want to read more about colour there’s a great reading list on the colour association website: http://www.colorassociation.com/resources

Hope you have a colourful and inspiring day!

Design and science, an investigation for 2012

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Ruth

2011 was a year with a lot of change for me, so in 2012, I have an urge to go back to my design roots and investigate two questions that have been floating around at the back of my mind for a while now. On New Year’s Day, in the dark gloom that is midday over a flat white, they crystallised, and will form the subject of investigation for this year. The purpose? To help me, and others I hope, understand why good design makes good design. I intend to post with a mixture of words and pictures, my observations of the world and my own design interpretations of these ideas.

As a precursor to where these questions have come from, throughout my 8 years with d3o, and being married to the founder, inventor and designer Richard Palmer, I have been engulfed in the seemingly opposing worlds of design and science. But, as we learnt on our journey, the two disciplines are in fact intrinsically linked. Creativity is present at the highest levels of mathematics, science and engineering, it’s a fundamental ingredient to problem solving. Design, in terms of thinking about the human aspect, aesthetics, and simplifying meaning, was so important to our branding success. Although we knew this at the time to some degree, it has taken me some time to process the importance of this, and to have the capacity to investigate it further, if you are running a startup you will know what I mean!

So, my two question are:

Question 1: What is beauty and why does it create desire?

As a designer, I instinctively know what looks good and what does not. Years of fine art training has taught me about composition, the use of white space and colour and tone. But why do we see some things as beautiful and others not? I am looking forward to investigating both the established tools and tricks of the trade, but the history and psychology behind their meanings.

Question 2: What is the link between science and art?

One of the established methods of creating an appealing composition is to use the Golden Rectangle, a rectangle of ‘divine proportions’ (based on a mathematical formula) that has been around in the artists community since 300BC. Where did this come from and why does it make for attractive composition? Another fascinating set of numbers is the Fibonacci series. The sequence of the whole set of numbers goes like this:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 ,21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987,1597, 2584…

What defines the numbers is the fact that each number is the sum of the previous two. These numbers can then be turned into ratios, known as the golden ration. What is fascinating though is that this pattern of rations can be seen in numerous places in nature, for example the number of spirals formed by the number of seeds in a sunflower, the formation of snails shells, how the veins of leaves grow…and these are objects and proportions we find beautiful, so what’s the connection?

There’s plenty to go on here, but whilst hiding from the rain and browsing in the bookshop today, I found a book called “50 mathematical ideas you really need to know” by Tony Crilly. This is a fascinating book that is going to be a great source of design inspiration. It will take me a little longer than a year to illustrate them all, but I intend to attempt as many as I can!

Watch this space…

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