From the course: Learning Infographic Design

Starting with color

From the course: Learning Infographic Design

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Starting with color

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- [Instructor] Because you already laid out all of your text using the planned type treatments during the wire frame phase, a good first step to bring your design to life is to add color and background elements to your text where needed. This is where you begin to establish patterns with color. For example, you may choose to use a specific color to represent every number used throughout your design. If that's the case, take a moment to change the appropriate text to match that color. In the case of this design, I've chosen to always use a bold type treatment for any dates and numbers, but am not associating colors to numbers since the color palette itself has black as a more dominant color. Now, once you've identified how to use color throughout your text, the next step will be to determine if there are other repetitive elements in the design that should use a single color. For example, I've chosen to use light gray for all speech bubbles in the design. You'll also see that I've chosen one solid color for the background of this design. Sometimes you'll find that infographics use color to break up sections by alternating solid color backgrounds throughout. While this is a common practice, I would actually suggest against it unless you want each section to work as its own independent thought. By shifting solid color backgrounds in a design, you indicate to your audience that there is a topic shift of some sort. This can become quite confusing if there isn't a large enough shift in the narrative to warrant it. Instead, challenge yourself to maintain a consistent background and use headline treatments and illustrations to break up the various sections of your content. Next, it's important to determine which color will act as your primary color in illustrations and what might be your secondary or accent color. When you already have an established brand color palette, this can be easier than most decisions. In this example, I'm using the brand colors of my agency, Killer Visual Strategies. Our brand guidelines state that our blue should be our most dominant color with our pink acting as an accent to the blue. Because of this, I'm going to follow that same pattern for this design. When you have a bright color that contrasts well with the rest of your design, like our pink does, it's great to use it sparingly to encourage eye flow from top to bottom. It will actually stand out as a unique visual element when it's used with that specific purpose in mind. Throughout your design, look for any other ways that you can use color to establish patterns for the audience. The narrative may not always warrant this, especially in a design like this, where datavis doesn't even start until the last half of the design. Still, whenever the opportunity arises to use color for categorization and/or important call-outs, take advantage of it. We subconsciously process so much information through patterns alone and great infographics take advantage of this all the time.

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