Since You Only Live Once is a travel photo-heavy book, the colors are vibrant and lively. However when it comes to the page with text, the colors are not as diverse and in a softer tone to balance the richly-colored photos.
The color used for the text sections are green, yellow and blue. All of which give a sense of nature, travel and lively. While the main text itself is black for simplicity and easy for the eyes to read.
For the cover, the first color you’ll see is green. The book use green for the word to emphasize “ONLY” and “ONCE” but also to create contrast from the words “you” and “live.”
As mentioned, the main text are in black, both titles and the story. However, the yellow separator is used to separate the title from the deck and story itself. The yellow color is not as strong, and the line used is also thin, so we can still tell that they are the same story. On the other hand, there is always a thick dark green line to below the paragraphs to separate the story and the list of recommended places. Dark green gives a stronger sense of separation between the 2 texts. Although we know that they are still related due to the content being on the same page. In addition, there are more yellow separators for the lists, showing that they still have the same content but the line helps the readers to see there are 4 topics. To add yellow to the numbers of the list also creates a more fun vibe without over doing it, by creating contrast rather than having the texts all black.
Furthermore, sometimes the book plays around with the title design or add illustrations around the title. The fish are blue because the blue conveys the sense of water, sea and ocean.
For a shorter story form, the text are all black to remain simple. This is also because with little story, they often come with big photo, and already have many elements and color on them. The texts should be as simple as possible to be easy for the eyes.
The colors used for informational illustrations also have a soft tone, to make it easy for the eyes to find certain things.
However, with objects illustrations, the colors are more lively to convey the sense of how the real objects would be like.
Overall, the colors used match with their purposes. The color tone is consistent and well thought out. The color scheme gives a sense of adventure, lively and happy but not too extreme, it still conveys the sense of sophistication as Lonely Planet brand is.
