November 2007

Look Print’s Series – 101 Marketing Ideas for Advertising with ‘ BIG’ prints!

Increasing your Outdoor Advertising Success (part 2)

Maximise the colour contrast!

The spectrum of full colour, vividly and faithfully reproduced, is one of outdoor advertising's distinct advantages. Designs bursting with brilliant colour can evoke emotional responses that will inspire lasting impressions.

However, it is essential that outdoor designs are easy to read. Choose colours with high contrast in both hue and value. Contrasting colours are viewed well from great distances while colours with low contrast will blend together and obscure a message. In fact, research demonstrates that high colour contrast can improve outdoor advertising recall by 38 percent.

A standard colour wheel clearly illustrates the importance of contrast in hue and value. Opposite colours on the wheel are complementary. An example is red and green. They represent a good contrast in hue, but their values are similar. It is difficult for the cones and rods of the human eye to process the wavelength variations associated with complementary colours. Therefore, a quivering or optical distortion is sometimes detected when two complementary colours are used in tandem.

Adjacent colours, such as blue and green, make especially poor combinations since their contrast is similar in both hue and value. As a result, adjacent colours create contrast that is hard to discern.

Think carefully before choosing a font!

Fonts selected for outdoor designs must be easy to read from variable distances. Adequate spacing between letters, words and lines will enhance visibility. The relative size of letter characters is also an important consideration. Words comprised of both upper and lower characters are generally easier to read than words constructed solely of capital letters.

Try to avoid following mistakes when choosing your font:

1) OVERCROWDING - Compressed type or too many words will reduce the clarity of a message.

2) EXCESSIVE - Extreme variations between ascending and descending letter segments and serifs 
     greatly reduce legibility.

3) ANEMIA - Fine typefaces will fade into a background, becoming indistinguishable as the viewing 
     distance is increased.

4) ILLEGIBILITY - Ornate and sans serif typefaces can be difficult to read, reducing the effectiveness
     of an outdoor design.

5) OVERWEIGHT - Heavy typefaces lose their basic shape when the viewing distance is increased.

Enjoy! The following images can hopefully give you some ideas for your organisation:

     Did the above article make you curious about outdoor advertising?

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