Red truck? Go with grays.

Braun Bleamer [Jet Signs, Palmerton, Pennsylvania] learned to work with color choices for red vehicles in his early days of lettering racecars. You don’t have to spend much time at a racetrack before you realize that most of the cars are screaming red. And since they’re all racing at the same place, you need to develop design strategies that help them each look unique.

Red is a midtone color so other midtones lack the contrast to have the necessary impact for the primary copy. They work fine as accent colors, but they would make the main copy weak and unimportant. It takes very light or very dark colors on the essential message to make it strong and visible on a red background.

For Braun, that’s where gray tones come into play. Pale gray delivers a strong contrast to red and delivers a tasteful metallic look. It lends itself to pure white and black special effects, so it gives you options for enhancing the primary copy. It’s also versatile if the next vehicle the customer brings you is not red.