Same difference

After having the very fortunate experience of a trip to Dubai last month to visit our client – Arabian Travel Market, it lead to a unique perspective on the branding challenges the region offers.

The biggest challenge, it seems, is the range of typefaces available to translate the same level of contemporary or traditional/established values a brand captures.

Take Rolex for example. For me, this fails remarkably on face value. It's very difficult to gauge what is perceived as a luxury or established typeface in arabic, but the chosen script face does not convey the brand values of Rolex for me.

The identities that tend to work the best are specifically crafted for a particular brand and then translated again for the foreign market. Fanta works very well. A direct translation of the fun, forward thinking brand.

Brands that rely on a twist within the typography face an even greater challenge. Luckily the FedEx logo still manages to retain the hidden bonus within, pointing instead to the left, the direction of reading. Even though I know what the logo means, the arrow seems more obvious. Possibly because the surrounding text has no direct meaning to me. Nice work.

... and the colour doesn't look right, can you fix it?

It's somewhat common, though not at all remarkable, that we're often asked to 'please fix the colour' within a piece of design collateral. The question is nearly always asked as though the colour needing to be 'fixed' is a given. No other possibilities considered - and why would there be? The colour doesn't look correct, so fix it.
Right?

Well, as you'll see from the image here, sometimes the colour is just fine and dandy. It's you, the beholder, who needs fixing. Or more correctly, your eyes and brain need to evolve just a little more to overcome the problem of 'bridging information gaps' which result in an incorrect analysis.

So, you're looking at embedded spirals, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue. Right?

Wrong! What you think is blue is precisely the same colour as the green. Go ahead - grab the image and blow it up. It's green I say. Green green green.

The reason they look different colours is purely because our brain judges the colour of an object by comparing it to surrounding colours. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as they appear at first glance. The orange stripes don’t go through the 'blue' spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the 'green' one.

Without us being consciously aware of it, our brains compare that spiral to the orange stripes, forcing it to think the spiral is green. The magenta stripes make the other part of the spiral look blue, even though they are exactly the same colour. The overall pattern is a spiral shape because our brain likes to fill in missing bits to a pattern. Even though the stripes are not the same color all the way around the spiral, the overlapping spirals makes our brain think they are. The very fact that you have to examine the picture closely to figure out any of this at all shows just how easily our little brains can be tricked. Grrrr!!

Anyway, just spare a thought about this the next time you think your Pantone 405 doesn't look quite right. Perhaps the reality is actually different to what you're seeing.