I have a love and hate relationship with the color maroon and its cousin, burgundy. Ever sit through a meeting and heard “oh, I know, how about a nice maroon, or burgundy instead?”, I know I have.

Face it, non-designers love to suggest this color. Yes, I have freely chosen to use these colors in the past, but maroon can’t just be thrown out anywhere and at anytime. On the wrong project, maroon becomes the abomination of banality, and every time you return to that client’s project, the color I swear looks more and more faded.

What I have found over the years, is that if you use maroon or burgundy, then you have to just to pour it on. It isn’t a color you can just sprinkle into a bright setting and expect it to still be that luscious hue you’d hope for.

Keep it in the family of other provocative colors, maroon needs black, deep reds, chocolate browns, purples, and several variations of itself. Used in a brighter composition, and it tends to look washed out (hence why I keep thinking it’s somehow digitally fading on my monitor and proofs straight from the printers).

Now, I should clean. Maroon happened to be one of the primary colors for my wedding back in the late 90s, but I think that decision came down to a matter of us having little choices of which napkins to choose, which that decision then snowballed to dictating the look of the entire ceremony, but I digress.

A friend of mine nailed it when it came to defining people’s attraction to this color. As he put it, in their mind at least, “if you need an interesting color but you feel you need to project a little bit of class, then maroon is the choice.”