Color Postcards vs. Black-and-White Postcards

Color postcards are vibrant, eye-catching, profit-pounding machines - a far cry from mundane black-and-white postcards. But just printing color postcards doesn't mean you'll pull in a huge return on investment; you must still follow the basic tenets of direct-mail marketing to achieve success. Still, creative use of color can enhance your presentation and make it more likely that your message will be read, understood and acted on. Here are some creative ways to use color to make a splash in your postcards.

Color outlines

Anyone can make a full-color postcard, so using color to make your postcard designs stand out can be a challenge when everything is saturated. Try pulling back on your fill colors and outline with heavy, dark strokes to create a profound sketch-like design. You could, for example, fill your shapes, images, graphics, and text with a light pastel blue and outline them with a thick royal or navy blue. The goal is to look different so that your customers' eyes will instantly be drawn in to your message.

Lighting and shading

Great graphic designers know that light and shadows are powerful design elements. Not only do they make your postcards appear more professional (and thus trustworthy), they can be used to draw your readers' eyes into the most important images or text in order to properly convey your message. Spotlight your unique selling proposition and you'll convert readers into customers more easily.

Contrasting colors

Few design elements stand out as starkly as contrasting colors, but white on black (or vice versa) isn't the most attractive way to contrast. Yellow and black, blue and white, blue and orange, blue and yellow, red and white: These are all excellent color combinations for putting contrast on your color postcards. You can achieve contrast with color patterns and images as well. Polka dots and stripes are easy to contrast with color, and you can always create contrast by coloring a well-known object in an unexpected hue. For example, you could make the moon green or color a Christmas tree in your corporate colors (assuming they're not already red and green). And yet another effective way to use contrast is to create a design that is mostly black and white, and use color to accent or highlight an important feature. A good example would be a postcard for a lipstick company that has a close-up of a model's face in black and white (grayscale) with bright red colorful lips. Color postcards are a more powerful way to market your company's products and services than black-and-white postcards, and the best part is that printing postcards in color costs little more than printing them in black and white. You can get 1,000 full-color front and back 4-inch by 6-inch postcards printed on premium 16-point gloss paper for less than $140 from PsPrint.