STYLE GUIDE

Colour

This section gives pointers about the best use of colour in HYMS communications.

Before we go any further, let’s clear up one confusion. Screens are fickle things, and desktop printers are even worse. If you've used the right colours (specified by Pantone number or CMYK), then the fact that they look odd on your screen or printer is just something you’ll have to live with.

Besides, the idea of the 'right' colour is a bit of an abstraction. If you want to know what the HYMS colours 'should' look like, you'll need to consult one of those Pantone flick-books used by designers. You'll see that even the logo on the front cover of the HYMS prospectus isn't quite perfect.

When you use HYMS blue and orange, make sure they're the official colours.

The HYMS colours are used on the logo and in many other contexts. They are:

The background colour is always white.

If you're using Word or another program which doesn't understand Pantone references, you can specify the same colours using the CMYK model. This describes how they're manufactured by mixing the 'primary' colours of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (yes, K stands for blacK – don't ask). The values are:

• indigo: C 100%, M 94%, Y 0%, K 38%
• orange: C 0%, M 40%, Y 100%, K 0%

And if you're working with web pages, you might need the hex codes:

• indigo: #260F54
• orange: #FCA311

This does NOT mean that everything you do should have indigo text with orange underlining. Black is just fine.

Don't be afraid to use other colours.

Nothing in these guidelines should prevent you from using whatever colours you like in your communications. Have a look at a recent HYMS prospectus and you'll see that it draws on a completely different palette, reserving indigo and orange purely for the logo. Although you can't go wrong if you stick with black, plus touches of indigo and orange, at the end of the day how you design your document is up to you.

Beware of colour blindness.

About one in five men (and one in 10,000 women) are colour-blind in some way. This has many implications for good design, and this isn't the place to go into them, but here are some ground rules:

• Don't use colour as the sole means of conveying information (e.g. in a graph). Use patterns, shapes or locations too.
• Don't expect everyone to be able to distinguish between two different colours of about the same brightness. Bright red text on a bright green background, or vice versa, might be invisible to one in ten of your readers.

For more detailed information about how to use colour in ways that doesn't cause problems, visit http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/#redundant1.

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