It’s been a while since I’ve blogged my inspirations. And whilst I’m much more inspired by Autumn and Spring than I am Summer, the fact is that I just didn’t get round to photographing as much as I would have liked over the last few months. I suspect that my lack of time to photograph still lifes has much more to do with the fact that my life has been turned upside down and inside out with our house renovation than anything else. And whilst the house certainly isn’t finished, I was so inspired by just how beautiful it’s all looking with the light flooding in under the veranda and through our bifold doors that I just had to snip the last of the colour from the garden and put together a hasty still life.

The colours of this late Autumn arrangement look decidedly festive don’t they? So much so that I can’t decide whether it’s late Autumn or early Winter – I’m thinking that with this seasonal palette they can only be Winter.

I never cease to be inspired by what’s going on in the garden. I love flowers and almost always have a bunch or two plonked in vases around the house. There’s something reassuring about their fragile beauty. When the builders cleared their stuff out of the new dining room one of the first things I did was grab a few stems and pop them in a pint glass. Elegant, no, cheering – absolutely. There was something just beautiful about seeing a small spot of beauty in amongst the chaos.

Aren’t these colours just divine? Late Autumn colour verging, very much, on Winter colours. The colours are getting deeper and only the strongest plants will survive the frosts and snow to come.

Remember that series I wrote waaaay back in January about Colour Psychology? I wrote a series of posts about the seasonal colour personalities and also about the meanings and effects of colour. Well isn’t blogging just wonderful? You all tweeted it lots for me, you even gave me lots of lovely feedback about it. And then, as I wrote more and more posts those popular colour psychology posts slipped into the archives, only retrievable with a lot of digging.

Since colour psychology is so fundamental to everything that we do, and also to what I tend to post about on the blog, I thought it might be very helpful for you to have a quick reference to the Absolute Essentials of Colour Psychology with all the core detail in one place. And so without further ado, I present to you the series, grouped handily together into one category for your browsing.

You’ll always be able to access from the drop down menu at the top, and very soon Stu will also put a link in from the side. I hope that you enjoy!

Note: I’m going to get a little bit techy here about colour psychology. Regular blog readers will be familiar with me talking about seasonal colour psychology personalities and the effect they have on the business. If you’re new to the concept of colour psychology you may like to read my Colour Psychology Absolute Essentials posts first.

I’m often asked by clients whether their own personality has any bearing on the colour psychology of their business. My stock, and immediate answer is no, it shouldn’t do. Colour psychology is about using colour (and texture, shape, type) to support the key brand messages of your business. We’re very analytical about identifying those core attributes and they are what drive our decisions about colour. But it’s not quite as simple as that.

Your personality will probably influence your business

In my experience, the vast majority of entrepreneurs shape their businesses in line with their own values. You may do this consciously or subconsciously, but experience tells me you’ll do it.

This often means that both business and business owner will share certain characteristics and attributes. And I think this is more prevalent, though not exclusively so, in small businesses.

Small businesses don’t always feel comfortable about showing their true “personalities” through their brand. And I think that’s a shame. By being aware of your core brand values and creating a brand identity that supports that, you’ll gain more profitable, loyal clients and differentiate your business from your competitors. It’s certainly a benefit we see time and again with our branding clients at Flourish.

But I digress. Let’s think big for a moment. Do you suppose Richard Branson eradicated his personality when setting up Virgin? Of course not! It’s his very drive, values and ambition that many of his customers find so utterly compelling. And that message is very aptly supported by the Winter colour palette: exciting, vibrant reds, luxurious and strong black.

So to scale back to small businesses. If small business owners are prepared to embrace the effect their own personality has on their business brand, then the chances are that your business colour psychology personality will be very similar to your own personality.

Your business colour psychology won’t be in line with your personal colour psychology because we want to please you, but most likely because my experience tells me it’s nigh on impossible to completely eradicate the influence of the business owner on their company, and that leaves a lasting, and positive, impression.

What do you think? Do you accentuate or dampen down your personality within your business?

You know we love beautiful colour palettes – palettes that not only look great but that work together and powerfully communicate the message our client wants to. Well today I want to give you a bit of an insight into how we create these palettes.

It’s easy to look at these harmonious palettes, all sparkling and lovely and assume that they’re thrown together in five minutes. On the contrary! Each palette takes us at least two, if not three hours to put together, check and refine before we release it to the client. Harder than it sounds eh?

Getting started…

First up we need to put the palettes together in natural light. Below is a palette Caroline and Chloe put together for Buttons events late one Friday evening. At the time it looked harmonious, when we checked again in natural light there were colours that just weren’t working -some were too bold and Wintery and others had a touch of delicate Summer about them.

It’s pernickety I know, but it’s the subtleties that make all the difference when working with colour, and it’s this level of attention to detail that means that the finished article will be so much more cohesive and powerful as a brand identity.

We’ve marked on the paper the colours that just weren’t working for us.

Start with the seasonal personality

We’d already identified that Buttons needed to be a Spring personality, so we knew we were looking for light, bright, clear colours. In Buttons case, it was about the pastels as much as the strong tones as they look great visually and work really well for young children.

Find the colours that communicate powerfully

We then look at the brand attributes and select colours that reflect those. For example – fun (orange), creative (orange/ turquoise), well organised and stress free (blue) and so on. A couple of the colours are on there because they simply work well visually – the yellow for example – confidence, optimism and self esteem are not core to the Buttons brand but they do look great with the other colours and add a great balance.

It’s then about working through the Pantone chips pulling out any swatch we think will work. These books aren’t cheap, but they’re an invaluable resource for us. I tend to pull out dozens of swatches to give us plenty of choice.

Weed out those that don’t fit

We then work them through on a sheet of white paper, looking for the odd ones out.

You can already see we’ve pulled some away and are starting to pull together a cohesive colour palette.

Not without a little scrutiny from Senior Graphic Designer Rob.

We’ll always end up losing more than we retain. Don’t those chips look gorgeous? Can you see the differences between the yellows? On the top you have a Summery yellow, directly beneath it an Autumn yellow and at the bottom of the picture a more clear, Wintery yellow. It’s subtle, but important.

Final colour palette

Aaah! That’s better. Final logo design will be posted very soon…

Powerful design enables you to connect with your ideal clients. It’ll help you attract, engage and seduce them into buying from you or working with you, and of course, it’s a wider thing than just design. It’s about your powerful design fitting into a powerful brand strategy. Next week I’ll be sharing with you how you can create a powerful brand strategy, but for now, let’s think about powerful design, what makes good design into powerful design?

How can you be sure that when you’re working with a design agency that they’re going to provide you with powerful design and not just good design? What is the difference that makes the difference?

Powerful design requires an in-depth understanding of your business, your objectives and your customers. Run a mile from anyone who asks you what colours you want or to sketch out how you’d like something to look.

Powerful design takes time. Coming up with creative concepts that will really connect with your audience and unlock something within them doesn’t happen in a matter of moments. It’s going to take time to develop those concepts and produce polished artwork.

Powerful design utilises colour psychology to unlock your goals, values and message and also use it to authentically communicate with your ideal clients. As you’ll know from my colour psychology series, there’s more to colour psychology than simply knowing that blue is calming and red can be aggressive. Colour psychology enables us to help our clients communicate coherently, authentically and with clarity.

Powerful design is creative. When we create powerful design we think outside the box. Customer Essential works with large corporates therefore their site should be bland and safe, right? Wrong! By tapping into their brand values and company ethos we’ve created a site that firmly differentiates the company from their competitors and enabled them to really connect with their customers. Oh, and win a whole pile more business…

Powerful design is authentically you. As the lovely Kathy Ashdown said, the new website and blog feel very her. And that’s because we’ve combined a deep understanding of her with our creative flair, passion for typography and in-depth understanding of colour psychology to deliver something that really sends out the right signals about her.

Powerful design sweats the small stuff. Often the difference that makes the difference is the attention to detail. When you look through a powerfully designed website it’s not just the homepage that looks lovely – that strong design runs throughout the site and reassures and engages.

Powerful design will cost you more than good design. You need to find a really good agency – one that has a firm understanding of not just how to lay out a page, but typography, design trends and colour psychology. They’ll probably be very serious about investing in their team, which means that their hourly rate will reflect that. They won’t be the cheapest, but they will give you the best results.

Now a good part of that comes down to really understanding the brief and the designer having the nous to be able to apply a high level of creativity and empathy to your business. But let me share with you a real example from a lovely client of ours and you’ll see how powerful design works in reality.

In the very public eye companies like Abel and Cole, John Lewis and Liz Earle have powerful brands that really connect. With each of those brands, the brand equity, story, image is much bigger than just the design – but they’re distinctive and very personal designs.

Bad, to good, to powerful in several simple steps

At a much smaller level, Customer Essential‘s gorgeous website is a prime example of a business that dares connect with their customers. They dare show their personality. As MD Liz kindly wrote to me…

“For some time our clients have been telling us that our branding and communications do not do justice to our creative, caring and generous approach to consulting. We hadn’t really realised that the companies we were working with, often blue chip, would really buy this. We had always sought to tone down our personality.

The Flourish Team are taking us on a life-changing journey, not just a quick trip. We are now realising what it is like to connect with our brand, andhave others really buy it. Businesses do not buy brands, people do, we knew it, but didn’t realise it applied to us!”

Here’s the original. I’m going to put that in the weak design category. I might be being kind.

Here’s an example of a good design. It’s fine. It looks smart. It looks better than they had before. It doesn’t connect.

Now we’re talking! That’s powerful design.

We helped Customer Essential really connect with their brand. Through a deep understanding of the business and their objectives, a creative mood board session, applying our unique blend of colour psychology and award winning design and our dogged determination to deliver a cracking outcome.

And the result? Twelve months on from launching the brand the company won 100% of their proposals in 2010 and even had to turn work away!

Now tell me you can’t afford to invest in a powerful brand…

It was just meant to be a small token to say thank you, but we were blown away with the response we had, both online and via the telephone and email. And I was genuinely impressed that people knew it was us!

In less than a year the Flourish brand has become firmly implanted in our clients minds and is easily recognisable with or without our logo or company name.

We received a few tweets and emails and then I was knocked sideways by Nicky Parker’s very flattering post

“…because this company’s branding is so good I knew straight away that it was from Flourish. And that’s why the branding is so great. There was no mention of them anywhere, but the green velvet ribbon, the uncoated paper of the gift tag, the font and the message: “Just a note to say that we LOVE working with you”, was just so Flourish it had to be them.”

It really got me thinking. How many of you have a distinctive enough brand that twenty of your most loyal customers would recognise something as your business without your company name or your logo?

So many of us make the mistake of thinking that your logo is the be-all and end-all of how your customers recognise and identify with you. Your logo is just the beginning – it’s everything else around your logo that makes a difference too – your colour palette, your house fonts and also your voice.

So go on, I dare you to send out a piece of communication without your details on it – do people know who its from? If not, come and have a chat with us and let’s help you create a powerful brand identity that extends beyond your logo…

Image: Not on the High Street

Brown is my black. I love it’s earthy, substantialness and it’s subtle calming effect when used in lighter shades. Brown feels natural, grounded, stable and reliable. There isn’t much that’s flighty or unreliable about brown is there? If used in the right proportion brown can feel balanced (I love to combine it with green or lilac) and there are the obvious organic connotations too.

It’s a very down to earth colour that signifies stability and reassurance. It’s practical, honest, genuine and sincere as well as being warm, industrious and sensual. It’s a hardworking colour, wholesome and values quality above anything else. It encourages orderliness and organisation, although not necessarily perfectionism. Brown isn’t a flashy colour, but it is certainly quietly confident.

Negatively many people dismiss brown as being boring, staid and heavy. And it can indicate instability or unreliability. It can also indicate a lack of sophistication, stinginess or materialism.

Bell: Cox & Cox, Stationery & Twigs: Brides; all other images: Martha Stewart

I love orange. It’s a bit of a marmite colour, and when we first explored using orange as a part of the Flourish identity I was pretty resistant. To me orange represented everything that was downmarket and low-frills. Thanks mainly to budget airline Easyjet our view of orange has been tainted in recent years. And pretty unfairly I might add.

Orange is creative, sociable, fun and approachable. It represents abundance, boundless energy, passion and sensuality. It also provides security and physical comfort in the sense of food and warmth.

Negatively one might perceive orange as insecure, frivillous, deprived and lacking in serious. There are also our “conditioned responses” to the colour thanks to it’s use in recent years. I say give orange another go! Many clients are reluctant to even consider it but when combined with skill and flair you can be on to a winner.

Images: all Martha Stewart

Pink is a very feminine energy. Compassionate, warm and nurturing it is more than just a tint of red. Pink combines the passion and warmth of red with the purity and softness of white. It is romantic, intimate and represents procreation, kindness and empathy. It’s soft tones are reassuring, nurturing and intuitive. It also represents hope and optimism.

From the softest blush pinks to the deepest magenta, the deeper the pink the more warmth and passion is communicated. Softer tones are non-threatening, flirtatious even whilst hotter pinks are more playful and sensual.

Pantone’s colour of the year, honeysuckle, is a confident, reddish pink described by the colour institute as “Courageous. Confident. Vital. A brave new color, for a brave new world. Let the bold spirit of Honeysuckle infuse you, lift you and carry you through the year. It’s a color for every day – with nothing “everyday” about it.

A dynamic reddish pink, Honeysuckle is encouraging and uplifting. It elevates our psyche beyond escape, instilling the confidence, courage and spirit to meet the exhaustive challenges that have become part of everyday life.”

Negatively pink can be naive, vulnerable, downmarket and needy. It can feel over-cautious, girlish and lacking in willpower and self worth.

Honeysuckle illustration: PVE Design; Flower: Art.com; Roomsets: Martha Stewart; Bridesmaid (one of the little H’s); bridesmaids (from my wedding); Pink felt hearts: PurlBee; Blackburn Necklace and Clips: Yarwood-White