How to choose your brand colors

Do you feel clueless when it comes to picking colors for your brand? Can’t tell your chartreuses from your charcoals? Not sure how to even approach this decision? Or maybe you’ve hired a designer to create a logo for you and she’s made you some in a range of different colors….. but argh, HOW CAN YOU CHOOSE???

Color is my absolute favorite thing about design, maybe even about the world. Every day I thank my lucky stars for my ability to see the spectrum in all its diverse glory. I think I was born with the sensitivity to tell the difference between 100 shades of the same color and put them to different uses. As a creative, this obviously comes in really handy.

I have no idea who made this meme but it is the truth.

Choosing the right color palette for your brand has lots of benefits, most of them acting on people’s subconscious. With proper color selection, you can:

Make your brand more memorable or re-callable to people who see it
Make your content, logo, or imagery more readable (so people will spend more time looking at it)
Express subliminal messages about what you have to offer
Associate your brand with certain movements, emotions, or things that people recognize

What I have found in working with brands and with entrepreneurs is that most people are missing a certain basic knowledge of how people see and experience color. Here are a few key concepts that serve as a quick primer to understanding color. So… not quite the same as spending 4 years in art school, but if you can get comfortable with these, you’ll find you aren’t nearly as confused as before:

Chroma or saturation

Chroma (sometimes called saturation) refers to how vivid or dull a color is. Below you’ll see a diagram showing the same colors with their vivid versions versus their less-saturated versions. Highly saturated colors are often what we read as a color that really “pops”. They are used to bring strong emphasis or high energy into whatever you use them for. One thing to keep in mind with very saturated colors is that you’ll need to be careful with legibility when using them for text, or as a background for text. Make sure that your text is dark or light enough to be seen clearly when using saturated colors for calls to action, blocks of text, or backgrounds for paragraphs.

Hue

Hue refers to what you might usually think of as the name of the color itself. It includes all the colors on the spectrum of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo, violet and every shade in between. Colors are usually laid out in a circular fashion to show the spectrum of all hues, as in this standard color wheel below.

Often, designers and artists will use colors from directly opposite sides of the color wheel - this allows you to play colors off of one another with a high level of contrast. So, colors with reddish hues will really stand out against the green ones, and the same goes for blue/orange pairs and purple/yellow pairs. This is super useful when creating a color palette, as you may want to have a dominant color and then another, secondary, supporting color that contrasts with it. This helps create more liveliness and interest in your color scheme. Alternatively, you can choose colors that are closer to each other, creating less color contrast, if you want to keep your palette very focused or simple.

Please note that the above color wheel is for digitally rendered colors. Paint color wheels are a little darker and you can find an example here.

Brightness

The last basic concept, brightness (sometimes called lightness), refers to how light or dark a particular color is. Think of this as the color sitting in a closed room. Turning on the lights waaaay up would result in a super light “washed” out color whereas turning the lights down very low will result in a darker color. Brightness is not to be confused with saturation; a highly saturated color can have both light and dark permutations, and so can a low-saturation color.

Putting it all together

Now that you have the concepts down, it’s useful to know that in general your brand color palette should include these 3 basic elements:

A distinctively saturated color OR an unusual color that can be associated with what you do.
An accent color to complement the first one. (This is optional.) You can use the color wheel to choose one directly across on the spectrum with a lot of contrast, or one closer on the wheel, for less contrast. This color can also be a light version of your brand color, which would serve nicely as a background for text.
A color dark enough to be used for text. (A few shades of black, navy, or grey for example.) Even if your brand color is dark enough that you can sometimes place white text on top of it, you still need to choose this for times when white text is not appropriate, or legible enough for those with certain visual impairments.

These colors can either be chosen for you by a designer/specialist, or you can give it a go yourself, if you’re so inclined. While a professional may give you great advice, you can also choose a hue because it holds some special meaning to you or your company. As long as you’re sticking to the basic guidelines above, you can usually make it work.

Alternatively, you can opt for a purely black and white color scheme instead, if that is a look you prefer, or if you aim to serve people who need ultra high-contrast for most things, such as older or colorblind folks.

Either way, once you have chosen your colors, the last thing to do is a bit of research. You will want to check out what other industries, companies, brands and organizations are using this hue or specific color, and make some educated guesses about how familiar your target audience is with those other organizations. Do you want to bring up those same connotations or be associated with those orgs? Or, would you rather stand in contrast to them? For example: using too much bright red + mustard yellow may have your audience associating you with fast food, since that’s a color scheme the industry is known for. These things change of course, and aren’t written in stone, so do feel free to break rules when necessary. Let’s take a look at some examples of brands who’ve chosen very appropriate or effective color palettes from all corners of the rainbow:

GREEN as a brand color

Green, a highly popular brand color is often used to signify that products are natural or wholesome, as seen in Whole Foods’ and Starbucks branding, among many others. But green hues work in other contexts as well. Spotify’s highly saturated, almost neon green is a perfect foil for their dark interfaces, the design of which led to higher engagement when they released it back in 2014. One disclaimer: dark interfaces don’t always work well for everyone (i.e. people with astigmatism or migraines) so be careful that your brand palette doesn’t exclusively rely on having a dark interface.

BLUE as a brand color

Another extremely popular brand color, blue has almost been used to death by big recognizable brands, notably large tech companies: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Vimeo, Skype, and many giants of the 20th century: AT&T, Visa, General Electric, HP, General Motors, Boeing - to name just a few. It has come therefore to connote trust and professionalism, while also being perceived by some as boring. Still, you can put your own spin on this color.

The popular mindfulness and meditation app, Calm, uses a palette composed of blues and indigoes to put you in the mood for sleep and relaxation as you listen to their guided meditations. Water and nighttime sky imagery also play a part in their branding, in keeping with the theme of restfulness. You can almost feel your stress melting away before you’ve even signed up.

PURPLE as a brand color

Purple as a hue is surprisingly versatile, with a very wide range of connotations and associations that can be woven into it. Compare Cadbury’s signature rich, sweet and dreamy purple with the more functional, no-nonsense eggplant color used by Slack - an appropriate color scheme for a platform “Where work happens.”

Source: Bulletproof’s 2020 update of the Cadbury brand

Slack’s purple means business. It is a good contrast to Cadbury’s more youthful/playful one.

PINK as a brand color

When life gives you lemons… Lemonade set out to upend the insurance industry by offering easy-to-understand, easy-to-purchase, and easy-to-claim insurance to the younger generation. The juicy, fruity, high-energy pink in their branding is supported by a palette of muted greys to create an unexpectedly zesty combination that isn’t at all typical of the insurance industry and sets them apart from competitors.

RED as a brand color

Red has also been a popular color of choice for entertainment and fashion companies due to its ability to stand out, while expressing warmth, fun and joie de vivre. H&M, Airbnb, Netflix, Pinterest, and of course Coca Cola - the most historic and iconic of the lot - are all good examples. Red is often used together with black and white, as they heighten its liveliness.

ORANGE as a brand color

Orange is sometimes used in food branding because it is perceived as “appetizing” - most baked foods indeed fall into the orange/golden spectrum. Both the cooking community Yummly and digital health provider Omada Health (which offers nutrition-related behavioral training) use bright orange-red as a primary color with a secondary color of greenish-blue. The combination illustrates how you can achieve a punchy, playful contrast when choosing colors directly across from each other on the color wheel.

The Yummly home page. Many foods are shades of orange, yellow, or tan, so a deep orange complements them nicely.

YELLOW as a brand color

Using yellow as a brand color has been considered a bit risky because of its fast-food or “tacky” connotations (think McDonald’s and Burger King), but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should avoid it for your brand. Snapchat successfully uses blinding yellow to show an edgy, youthful, and subversive side to their technology. Other brands like Post-Its, Subway, and Best Buy use bright, robust yellow to grab attention and signify affordability, using yellow’s “cheap” connotation to their advantage.

Source: Post-Its - An iconic yellow product.

Snap Inc’s Snapchat landing page: yellow so bad it’s good.

BLACK & WHITE as a brand color scheme

Black and white can be used to dramatic effect, either via bold repeating patterns or minimalist restraint. Sephora demonstrates this with eye-catching contrast in their storefronts, packaging, and digital presence. Other brands with a purely digital presence use a minimalist black and white color scheme as a contrasting backdrop to the colorful exuberance of the content that you can create with their product, like Figma and Blush below.

Source: Figma, collaborative design software

Source: Blush, a collection of illustration libraries for mixing and matching

Are you ready to mix and match your own brand colors yet? I hope you’re ready to experiment with confidence. Or, contact me if you’d like to chat about colors, I’ll be tickled pink ;-)

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