When it comes to corporate branding and identity, the red and green of Christmas have been off limits.
Banished to the fringes of the color spectrum are innocent hue combinations that are forever doomed to be associated with holidays. This time of year the world is awash with red and green, celebrating the spirit of Christmas, good will and mass hysteria at the mall. However, when it comes to design and branding, red and green are categorically rejected by clients unless the company is a global pizza enterprise.
Even when these colors are strategically sound for a brand, a CEO’s reaction will remain swift and direct: “too Christmas-y.” I once tried some sleight-of-hand in a presentation by introducing these colors as “punch and pine.” No good. The association with a poinsettia plant and industrious elves is so strong that red and green get their due for only a few weeks a year.
These bright colors are not alone in their plight. For example, the following line up of usual suspects share a similar fate. Which celebrations do you associate with these colors?
The choice of a distinctive brand color takes enormous corporate courage and vision. Brown and gold for UPS, robin’s egg blue and white for Tiffany & Co. and pink for T-Mobile are color choices with distinction. However, some of the “troubled” color combinations have been successfully employed by companies like Black & Decker and TD Bank who understand that context is everything when it comes to color.
I once heard the late design legend Massimo Vignelli tell of a time when he presented black as a brand color. The client said that it felt “funereal,” to which Vignelli countered that it felt “black tie.”
Digital communications and online identities are no longer bound by 20th century reproduction processes thus expanding the color palette for emerging brands. However, blue, the flag of conservatism, is still the safe bet for thousand of corporations. Red? Sorry, Coke, Target and Virgin, no one in this brand-saturated world truly owns red. But add an accent of green and it is mighty handy at Christmas time.
Ken Carbone is a founding partner and artist-in-residence at Carbone Smolan Agency in New York City. He is the co-author of Dialog: What Makes a Great Design Partnership and a recipient the AIGA Medal for lifetime achievement. A version of this article was previously published in Fast Co.com.