The Science of colour

We've been thinking in terms of colours a lot recently at VisitBrighton. Last week we had a day out of the office to do something called Prism training which is a form of profiling, the idea being to develop a better understanding of your own character traits as well as your colleagues to ensure you have the best possible working relationship. As you may have guessed the training is based on colours, and there are four main groups:

This is an example chart but I will try and summarise the main points for you. Green represents creativity and ideas; Blue is empathetic, emotional and supportive; the Red area indicates drive, determination and ambition and the Gold area (which looks Orange but it's meant to be gold) is someone who is highly analytical and precise. For the most part people are flexible and can flit between all four, however if you have a score of 75 or above (the outer edge of the circle) in any of the four areas then this is what you are most comfortable with and dictates how you will react under pressure. To be honest I'm not entirely convinced how useful this will be in day to day life, however it was a good day out and it was interesting to see the results which I have to admit were pretty accurate for everyone.

The other reason we have been thinking about colours is that it is just over a year since we launched the VisitBrighton brand and so we have been having an internal review to see if everyone has been sticking to the guidelines. You can download the guidelines and find out more about the branding work through our website but I thought as I was writing about colours today I would just mention our colour palette:

These colours were chosen as they best reflect the identity of the city - Magenta as it symbolises culture, femininity and health; Purple reflects royalty, spirituality and sophistication; Cyan because it represents the sea and sky and it is calming, and finally Black because it is timeless and stylish. These colours should be used in all of our Marketing activity, not all together but one could be used as a background colour in an advert or to highlight a piece of text. The colours are used in our logo and you can see on the homepage of our website that the menu tabs go through the spectrum from Cyan to Purple to Magenta. But which colour would you use, what colour do you think of when you think of Brighton & Hove?

Charlotte