With Spark, Marshall Lambert demonstrates that when it comes to color, it’s all relative.
by Brooke Yarborough
For Marshall Lambert (CFA’15), Founder of the curious and processual design and art practice Studio Skiffle, and the Creative Director of Spark, color selection is more than a subjective choice based on personal preference— it’s a science.
Known to artists and graphic designers as Color Theory, Lambert sat down with the Spark Editorial Team via Skype from her studio in Golden, CO, to provide insight into her process—shedding light on how methods of trial and error and experimentation set the tone and inform the content for Spark from one issue to the next. “For me, design is as much of an art practice as painting, for example,” says Lambert, who typically draws from other art forms in her work. “People often have strong opinions about color. I try to be really mindful of this when selecting colors—why I picked them, why I used them.”
While experimental in nature, Lambert embraces what she calls a painterly approach in developing a color system—manipulating colors through contrasting backgrounds and creating illusions from context. Through Adobe Color, Lambert often consults a color wheel before settling on a color system for any project; for Spark, it helps her “explore colors that complement each other.”
Spark’s design creates a rhythm; Lambert considers color’s role in the process: “To some degree, it is always present in the background of each spread,” she says. “Making a decision on that color so it’s not overwhelming, so there is a break in color, and pace, that’s where the experimentation comes in.” In developing the color system for Spark, Lambert “took into account everything [she] knew. Should the colors reflect the seasons, or the experience of schooling and changes over the semesters?” She also recalls drawing inspiration from other color systems she’s encountered: “The Harvard Art Museums uses a color system on their website where every day of the year is represented by a slightly different color of a spectrum.” For Spark, Lambert was searching for a color process that could transfer over many years.
In the end, the fall 2015 launch issue sampled two colors from the issue’s cover image as its primary colors; the inverse of those colors were then used as the primary colors of the winter 2016 issue.
This system of rules successfully carried the publication through two volumes and four issues, resulting in the addition of a third issue for spring and summer 2017, and a complicated quandary for Lambert to answer: How do you add new rules to a color system so it can handle an additional publication when the system was originally designed for a two-issue publication?
“I’ve had many fun ideas while thinking through what the ‘third issues’ could and should look like,” says Lambert. “We threw around a couple of ideas, and landed on the idea of a ‘wildcard issue.’” These are, together, the spring and summer issues after all, she tells us: “Students are anxious and flustered— blundered between final exams, graduations, and their futures, all in contrast to the excitement of warmer weather, Spring Break, and summer vacation.”
The spring and summer issue of Spark will harness those energies, flipping the systems in place on their feet by making the design a special and unique experience. “It’s a place to explore,” says Lambert. “This issue’s colors were inspired by the contrasting tartness and sweetness of grapefruit enjoyed in early spring. For these third-issues, color now becomes a ‘wildcard,’ and won’t be bound to the first two issues within the volume; gradients as currently expected may not necessarily exist. For the articles, I imagine greater possibilities in layout—perhaps white pages with different colored type, overlapping images, and repeating shapes, photos, and interesting textural overlays.”
“For me, this is the perfect time to talk about the color system and the design of Spark,” says Lambert. “I feel it relevant and important for our readers to understand the design on a deeper level. As a designer, I have felt really supported. Spark is an unusual publication that is well-represented by its team. They have been very open to experimenting with these theories and designs, which speaks volumes about CFA’s openness to curiosity.”
The result has been incredible. In just 18 months, Spark has won nearly a dozen awards in editorial, art direction, and graphic design. In the future, Lambert hopes to continue experimenting with patterns, illustration, and the unexpected experience.