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Here’s How to Get the Most Out of Your Printing with Colour
Tue Jul 25, 2023
Colourful printing has more positive effects on a business than you might think! Ever found yourself looking at a greyscale work brief or a brochure and thought “It’s a little boring to look at”? You’d be absolutely right in your thought process too. Black and white printing can be great for cost savings, but it can have negative effects on team and customer engagement with your brand. Colourful documents like marketing materials and internal handouts are much more attractive to the eye, helping people engage better with the information on the page.
It might be tempting to brush off colour printing as nothing more than a superfluous design choice, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. With the right colours, amount of whitespace, and word choice your message will better reach its target audience. Here’s why you should consider adding a pop of colour to your documents!
How Colourful Marketing Draws in More Customers
Marketers have long used colour psychology to help entice customers in and better align their branding with their target audiences. When you choose to add colours to your marketing materials, you’re boosting the chance that customers will remember you in the future. In fact, colourful marketing can help increase brand awareness and recognition by 80% (HubSpot). Customers have also shown that they are more likely to stop and read a poster or engage with marketing if it is in colour, with people being 42% more likely to read colour ads than greyscale ones (Canon).
By carefully selecting your colours, you can also encourage your customers to feel and act in certain ways. Different shades of blue, for example, can give off different “personalities” and teach your customers something new about your brand. Take UniTech’s colours, for example. In colour psychology, the tones of blue that we use help show our customers that we value loyalty and that we’re respectful (HubSpot). We also use aquas, which show that we’re down-to-earth (Help Scout). These colours together help to appropriately define our business: a locally owned company who always looks out for our clients’ needs!
Beyond the feelings that colours help encourage, they also play an important role in the future recollections of your target audience.
With 90% of an initial impression coming from the colours you choose (Review42), customers are more likely to remember a brochure or poster that you’ve printed off if it had colours than they are if it was greyscale.
It can be harder for people to recall the exact wording of a marketing handout you gave them versus remembering a colour that stood out to them on the page. When the client later thinks back on the colourful printed materials you gave them, their mind will be able to fill in the blanks around the design choices quicker than they would if you’d offered them a greyscale document. Overall, the colourful printed marketing materials you created will help your messaging sink in better.
This is true not only for future customers, but also for your team members!
Colourful Handouts Encourage Creativity and Engagement in the Workplace
Meetings can sometimes feel like time away from other critical tasks, and employees could come to the meeting with their minds elsewhere. They might be thinking about important upcoming projects or feeling stressed out from a busy day. If you then try to engage them in a creative team building exercise or brainstorming session with greyscale documents, you’re likely going to be met with a room full of silence. As we mentioned earlier, colours can help make people feel or think certain ways. It stands to reason that mute black and white tones aren’t going to encourage a sense of creativity.
Printing your internal meeting handouts, graphs, brochures, and agendas in colour instead will help you make a better impression on your team. It shows that you’re taking time out to think creatively and make the work you’re doing together more engaging. It will also help motivate your team to think outside of the box and brainstorming new ideas will be much easier.
When done properly, colour printing can also make your printouts “more readable” (Canon). If you have a lot of categories of information you’re working with or want to better break down an agenda of upcoming events, using colours can help differentiate information. People can find the details they’re looking for at a glance rather than having to read through the whole document again.
Earlier we explained how colours can help customers remember your messaging. Well, it can also help employees remember their tasks easier and help them learn faster. One study found that human minds are attracted to prominent and visible entities and colour when learning. They also found that warm toned colours can influence memory recognition and recalling processes (Khan and Liu, 2020).
By printing office handouts in colour, you’ll be fostering easier recall and retention of information for your team!
Best Printers for Colour Printing
From your marketing materials to your internal documents, you’re going to want a printer that can produce eye catching prints. The brighter and bolder your colours, the easier it will be for people to remember and act on the information you’ve given them. To get crisp, clear prints, you’ll want a printer that’s reliable from a company who knows the value of colourful documents.
Some of the best printers out there for colour are made by Canon. As a company known for their cameras that can produce stunning quality photos, Canon has translated their eye-for-detail over wonderfully to their printers. Their devices are both reliable and able to create vivid colour prints.
UniTech carries several colour Canon printer options, ranging from home-office sized printers to MFPs that can handle the output of a larger organization. You can browse our colour Canon printers here.
Get creative with colourful printing today. Contact us to find the best colour printer for your team’s needs!