Every designer and/or editor I have met has his own opinion on the subject of color headlines.
And so do I, of course. My preference is for headlines in black, 99% of the time. In the days before newspapers could reproduce beautiful color through photographs and illustrations, the occasional headline in color added a bit of visual excitement to the page.
However, today we can achieve colorful pages without colorizing headlines.
True, feature pages can benefit from a touch of color in a headline, and it can spice things up. More often, however, a page can run the extra mile with just good color images, and a nice, big headline in black.
The same applies to dropped capital letters, by the way.
All or a portion of this column was originally published in the IFRA newsletter.