Not all health foods are promoted with bright colours. Following the current trends toward healthy eating habits we are now eating more and more cereal products.

This has led designers to gravitate toward the subtitles of earthy browns and ochres to promote many ‘traditional’ products, which are much more in vogue now than they were in the past. Such colours are used not only to symbolize the natural, organic and healthy aspects of the produce but also to suggest tradition and evoke feelings of nostalgia.

Other earthy colours used in this context are dark greens, deep golds and
dark reds.

Up until the recent downturn in the economy, we had seen a surge in the demand for ‘recycled’ style printing. This used all these type of earthy colours. This has slowed down an awful lot since the trends for buying organic produce has reduced over recent months as consumers have tightened the spending, and buying organic has been less common.

This type of colouring isn’t used as much in leaflet printing these days, as leaflets tend to be more vibrant and eye catching where an ‘organic’ or ‘earthy’ coloured leaflet , would get completely lost against its more colourful peers.

But not all healthy companies go for dul pastels or earthy colours, checkout this ‘POT OF’ pakaging, this shows how colourts taken fomr the same side of hte spectrum as the organic set, an easily be used in a vibrat and eye-catching manor.

Many colours have messages that are internationally recognized and symbolize various actions, warnings, or products the world over. The most obvious example is the code for traffic signals: red for stop, green forgo. Although it is very easy to fall into the trap of generalizations, colours do have certain properties that remain the same through the pendulum swings of fashion which affect other aspects of colour, such as acceptability and popularity. it is these properties that convey the message of each colour.

By ‘properties’ I mean aspects such as volume, excitement value, temperature, and symbolic value. Let’s start with volume. There are quiet colours, such as light blue, light pink, and soft grey, and there are loud colours, such as bright reds and
bright greens. Their ‘volutme’ comes from their dominance (how much they seem to jump out at you), or from their recessive ness (how much they sink into the background). Dominanant, or loud, colours are aggressive, whereas recessive, or paler, colours are passive.

You might use quiet colours for a product such as a fabric softener, with its connotations of soft blankets and woolens, but it is unlikely that you would use loud colours for such a product. You’d might use loud colours for a food product, such as a salt, which will appear on the supermarket shelves among containers full of the same product, and choose bright colours such as red and bright blue
on white, simply so that your product will standout from all the rest.

Of course there are other considerations to be taken into account when choosing a colour, and they all combine to create the final product, but each must be assessed on its own before the whole is put together. So, onto the next – excitement value. ‘Excitement’ can refer to warning, danger, risk, and
fear. The colours used most commonly to signify excitement are red and orange, used extensively ill the areas of poisons and lethal chemicals, explosives and road hazards; but, particularly in the case of red, they also represent blood, horror and revolution. Conversely, for products with no – excitement value, a designer may want to put across the opposite image and use safe colours.
These are usually blues, browns, dark greens or greys.