Step 3 to effective large-format graphics: Contrast is your best friend

In my last column, I discussed making your text large enough to be legible so you're sure your audience can easily read your large-format marketing materials. Well, that's only one of many aspects to ensuring legibility in your marketing efforts. This month, learn how to maximize your target audience by building adequate contrast into your designs.

Tip 3: Use contrast to ensure maximum legibility.

There is a fragile eco-system at work whenever marketing material is distributed, whether large format or small. Your message, which should be the most important part of your marketing efforts, has to coexist with and more often than not subdue, other elements vying for a potential customer's attention. Depending on the piece, the message could be in the ring with the baddest of the bad, such as other imagery, the format of the piece, surrounding space, and even the typeface the message itself is rendered in. And that war rages on way before anyone important ever actually sees it.

When it is finally glimpsed, your message finds another challenge to contend with. You see, everyone sees color differently. Our perception of color can be affected by anything from our biology to simple things like our mood and diet. Many designers don't even consider the consequences of their color choices on marketing materials, and that leaves your message completely alone, with noone to notice it. After all, if something is difficult to see, people won't bother looking at it.

And so, controlling contrast on your marketing materials turns an ignored design into a successful marketing campaign. I would even go so far as to say that contrast is your best friend.

So, wherever you have text, you should use contrast to make it completely distinguishable from it’s background. That means if you have a dark background, place white text on it, and vice versa for a lighter background. Be mindful to use colored text and drop-shadows sparingly, because they can have a nasty habit of obscuring your text, even though all you wanted to do was to distinguish it from its background. White or black text with no shadow is usually the best.

In most cases, one of the reasons why colored text doesn't work is that designers aren't being careful to separate their normal values. The normal value is the shade of gray you get when you take out all the hue and saturation from a color and are left with only the brightness. Basically, if you were to run the graphic through a black and white copier, you’d see only its normal values. If you have a red blurb and a blue background with the same normal value, it will be very difficult to distinguish the text from the background, even though the colors are supposedly different. Since everybody sees color a little differently, making certain the normal values are different may be the only real way to be 100% certain your text will be read.

Finally, before sending your graphic along to the printer, proof the normal values by either printing it out in black and white on your desktop printer, or just converting a copy of your file to grayscale in Photoshop. You'd be amazed at what sorts of problems a hard proof will help you spot.

Read Ben’s Step 2 to effective large-format graphics: Size your fonts correctly

Ben Lawless wants to remind everyone to not drink beer with contrast. It may be your best friend, but it sure as heck ain’t your drinking buddy. Contrast will always expect you to pick up the tab. Trust us on this one.