How much does color count?

When browsing through the pages of a newspaper or magazine, what is it that catches your attention? Is it breaking news coverage of an event that occurred in the next town over? Or maybe the final score of the big game you had money riding on? If it isn’t the actual story being told, maybe it’s the way it’s being delivered. Do high-action headlines capture your attention, drawing you into every detail of a story? Drop caps and pull quotes add drama and intrigue to stories while photographs demonstrate what’s happening or who’s involved. Could it be color that hooks— images in varieties of shades that help to illustrate the mood? In my opinion, it’s not so much the different colors on a page, as it about how the colors work together to strengthen the impact of what the reader is looking at.

Pegie Stark Adam, author of “Color in Newspapers: Four Case Studies,” discusses the effects that color has on a page. One of the four case studies, the one I am concerned with, is when she looked at the idea of color as a unifying device for art, design, headlines, and graphics. Adam says, “Color can be used as an information device in very specific ways, such as a punctuation device to help the reader travel through the journey of the page. Color can be used to unify elements in a package.” In other words, how colors on an entire page work in harmony. “Our eyes long for relationships and they try to create relationships by grouping like objects and elements,” she goes on to say. “When one color is used in an illustration, a headline and a fact box, the eye gathers all those pieces together to create a unified package.” With this, Adam is noting the relative importance of one color acting as a page’s unifier, rather than numerous colors spread out without purpose.

To look at examples of this, I refer to the front pages of The Tampa Tribune and the Las Vegas Sun on Wednesday. The standout feature on the Tribune’s front page is that of the water bottle. Not only does it have a commanding presence with the way that it’s shown up top with the nameplate, but it sets the color tone of the page. The light blue from the label is reused to convey spilling water and is also seen in the floating deck about the article’s headline. Follow the blue as it fades down the center of the page and it leads you to a small photograph on the left side. The photo of the building and sky has a very chilled, stark feeling and the blue tones are again mimicked in another area on the page. Separately, these similarities might not mean anything, but when the reader looks at the front page as a whole, all the elements work together cohesively because the color works with the flow of the page, rather than against it.

The other example is the front page of the Las Vegas Sun. Just from the name of the newspaper I get a sense of warmth, but that feeling is further enhanced when the warm shades of yellow and gold are seen in various parts of the page. From the sun graphic in the nameplate and the teaser headline up top to the gold-colored tool in the tire photo and all the glowing light bulbs in the dominant photo, the warm yellow colors allow the pieces of the front page to come together as collaborative units.

This technique of pulling colors from photos is not only common in newspapers, but widely seen in magazines. I personally love the way it looks, in newspaper or magazine. I think it adds a fresh spin on connecting stories that would otherwise be unrelated. What other benefits could you see to there being one cohesive color on a page? Are there ways to incorporate more than one color without the unity being lost? What kinds of limitations should design and copy editors take when deciding what text they will make color?