color marketing group

For over 60 years, Color Marketing Group^® (CMG) has been the premier international association for color design professionals. As a nonprofit, their mission is to create accurate and relevant color and trend forecast information by connecting global color professionals in their shared passion. Members represent a broad spectrum of designers, marketers, color scientists, consultants, educators and artists. Their promise: To unleash the power of color by leveraging our collective experience and knowledge. (By the way, we highly recommend joining this group if you work in the color industry at all, or use color to develop or market products. Visit colormarketing.org.)

Britton Marketing & Design Group (BMDG) has a rich history and expertise in assisting clients that create and market colorful products, such as Vera Bradley, Peter Millar and Spoonflower, as well as paint brands and many others.

Since 2014, BMDG has enjoyed collaborating with CMG to create themes for their annual summit, which included refreshing their logo and identity in 2016. The new logo continued the idea of a camera aperture shape, symbolizing the act of focusing on visuals and color. It could be used alone as a colorful mark with many color fractals, or used open to focus on something underneath.

“Whether it be color, fashion or architecture, trends are constantly evolving, meaning CMG’s focus is ever changing, flowing, circulating—represented by the outer, ever-moving circle. CMG members recognize that color and those who love color are the driving force behind every trend and its tributaries, and the group comes together to direct those trends. The shape in the center symbolizes CMG as a collective group of professionals spanning an array of fields and practices. The mosaic pattern represents our collective experiences and interpretations coming together as a whole. The outer circle is representative of the recycling of trends and ideas—taking what once was and breathing new life into it.”

past and new logo

Annual Summit Collateral 2019

One of our favorite projects was creating the visual campaign for their 2019 International Summit in Tucson, Arizona. The CMG team had created the theme “Radiant Mirage.”

Being an optical effect that is sometimes seen in the desert, a mirage may have the appearance of a pool of water or a mirror in which distant objects are seen inverted, and that is caused by the bending or reflection of rays of light by a layer of heated air of varying density. This tied in very well with current times, in which everything around us changes so quickly and often. Worldwide, we see so many different perspectives on life, as we all seem to have different perceptions. As you drive through the desert, the eye meets multiple colors, visions and illusions.

Britton created a rallying cry: We see you. You are an innovator. A designer. An engineer. An architect. A marketer, strategist, scientist, creative. An artist. Ready to share your work with the world. But first, you research, you curate, you edit. Because this is where your magic happens, somewhere between the nuance and the new. Your world is anything but black and white. You live in color. We live in color. It is color that is our principle of design. It is color that gives our ideas shape and our innovations resonance. It is color that is our rallying cry, our muse, our passion. It is color that makes us ... us. We connect in color. We collaborate in color. We create in color.

The brief included additional inspiration, such as:

We mystify in color.

We enchant in color.

We marvel in color.

We allure in color.

We admire in color.

We perceive in color.