As any designer with more than a few years’ experience
with client needs and budget demands will
tell you, project limitations need not be creative
restrictions. However, even the most innovative
designer may give in to a bit of frustration when
told the budget only allows for two-color printing.
“There’s an automatic panic reflex,” says Jacques
Rossouw, creative director at Voicebox Creative in
San Francisco. “You think, ‘I have to do as much as
I can because I only have two colors.’”
But instead of taking flight, consider stepping
back. “As a designer, we live in this world where
almost anything is possible,” Rossouw points out.
“Cutting back to the basics forces you to think strategically
about every component. If someone has
only two colors and tries to do duotones and screens
and every version of what’s possible, they only create
visual noise. When you try to do too much with too
little, it doesn’t attract attention, doesn’t communicate
and doesn’t inspire the consumer to take action.”
TWO REFINED
In fact, two-color design can be a creative choice,
not a bottom-line restriction. Take, for example,
Voicebox’s designs for Clover Farmstead’s artisanal
butter. This premium product, hand-packed into
hand-made crocks with hand-tied ribbons, has a
commensurate price tag. However, the design went
in an intentionally different direction.
“We used two colors to communicate a very
specific brand quality,” Rossouw explains. “We’d
already added so many quality cues to the packaging
that we felt the label needed to be more understated.
It’s all part of communicating that this is a product
not touched by any machinery.”
The label is as sophisticated as it is simple. “The
challenge with two-color design is that it can look
very basic,” notes Rossouw. “But by selecting the
right substrate, you automatically have a third color.
An off-white paper coming through certain areas of
the illustration helps to prioritize the information. And when you refine your color choices, then negative
space becomes as important as positive space.”
TWO APPROPRIATE
Brand messaging was also critical to Jennifer
Wilkerson’s choice of two colors for a nonprofit
newsletter. “Given the budget, we could have
digitally printed four colors,” she explains. “But it
was inappropriate to the client. They want to look
frugal, but also appeal to middle-class folks and
their teenage kids.” By using “funky, upbeat colors,”
Wilkerson, of Aurora Design in Niskayuna, N.Y.,
gave the piece “presence and spice.”
Changing the format also extended usage
opportunities. “By thinking about its use beyond a
newsletter, we created something that folds easily, so
it can be handed out at farmers’ markets, but it also
works as a poster when you open it up. It hadn’t been
used on community bulletin boards before, but now
it looks natural there. We get much more bang for
our buck.”
PAPER FOR TWO
Or in the case of the work by Minneapolis-based
Charles S. Anderson Design (CSA) for French
Paper, “pop” for your buck. “We started out with
a line of paper called Pop Tone,” says Charles
Anderson. “We created it because we felt there was
no amazing, complete color line of paper out there.”
What happened next was a deep dive into the handscreened,
techno printing and poster underworld.
“Back in the day when French Paper had an
even smaller budget and everything was on the
cheap,” Anderson explains, “we had to do simple and
bold things that the printer couldn’t screw up. Or
big, bonehead design stuff that looked screwed up already. Now, with 16-color presses and UV printing,
you can do anything. With all this sophisticated
stuff, we got caught up in the technology of highresolution
CMYK printouts and forgot to think
about the paper first.” However, there are some who
have apparently not forgotten.
“The screen printer, the rock poster people,
they start with the paper—and white is an ink color,
not a paper color.” Taking inspiration from these
‘gig’ posters, the CSA team used simple illustrations,
leavened with a large dose of humor, and some dark
brown and special metallic-silver ink from Germany,
to create a paper promo that puts the emphasis back
on the paper. They even used the same printer that
French Paper used almost 25 years ago. “It took
thinking about how we did things in the beginning,”
Anderson says. “It took those poster people to point
out paper as a fetish thing, not a generic substrate.”
TWO THE POINT
By setting designers back on their heels, working
with only two colors becomes a boon to creativity.
In fact, it’s where Steve Gordon, Jr. of RDQLUS
Design in Omaha, Neb., almost always begins.
“I often start any project with only two colors, as
this allows me to focus on the shapes, forms and
the overall composition without getting distracted
by the emotional attachment to color,” he says.
“Many designers get too focused on color instead
of the fundamentals. There’s a lot of supposedly
creative work out there that’s not really very imaginative,
but working with two colors forces you to
be more imaginative.”
