What Does Your Colour Palette Say About Your Brand?
Thinking of which colours to choose for your brand’s identity, website and social media channels? Great!
But before you finalise your colour palette for your brand, have you considered what each colour means, and how it can dramatically impact your audience’s decision to work with you (or not)?
Welcome to Part 1 of 2 for this blog series on “What Does Your Colour Palette Say About Your Brand?”
And in this blog post, I’m going to be breaking down the impact of colour psychology, the core things you need to know before you select your colour palettes, and some of the best tools I use with my clients on how to create a professional colour palette.
Let’s take a deeper dive…
The role that colour plays in our lives is so fundamental, because it helps us to communicate ideas and trigger emotions without the use of words.
For example, we all know that red means “stop” and green means “go”, right?
Every colour elicits a different meaning and emotion. Which is why we need to make a conscious choice about which colours we choose for our branding, so that you and your business are communicating the message you want to share.
Can you guess which brand has this colour combination?
If I tell you: a soft drink brand with red and white. What do you think of? {Coca-Cola}
What if I tell you a coffee brand with green and white. Venti mocha latte with a sugar-free hazelnut syrup pump, please! What do you think of? {Starbucks}
Their colour palette isn’t random, it’s intentional.
There’s a reason why most social media and communication companies have blue branding. Or why so many movies use blue and orange for their movie posters (seriously, Google “blue and orange movie posters” and the results are pretty insane)
We have a universal response to colour stimuli and it’s been proven time and time again by various marketing and advertising research.
In fact, the #1 thing that your brain picks up when they interact with a new website is… you guessed it– colour! And this first stimulus is what can make or break it for your visitor.
So whether you’ve already launched your business or you’re in the process of DIY’ing your brand, it’s important that your brand colours align with your brand personality, ideal client, and the values that you want your brand to be known for.
5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing Your Brand Colours
But before you choose your colours, here are 5 Questions You Need to Answer About Your Brand first:
- In just a few lines, how would you describe your ideal client? Imagine as if you were describing your ideal client as a friend of a friend (make it as humane and personal as possible)
- If you had to describe your brand as a person to a friend, what would you say about it in just a few lines?
- Off the top of your head, what are the top 3-4 colours that come to your mind when you think about your brand?
- What are the top 3 values that you want your brand to be known for?
- What are the 3 main adjectives that describe your brand best? Remember to always keep your Ideal Client Avatar in mind when making any decisions in relation to your brand. Here’s a list to help you out, if you’re feeling stuck:
UNDERSTANDING COLOUR PSYCHOLOGY
Okay, so now that you’ve identified your 3 main brand adjectives, let’s keep those safe and take a brief moment to look into colour theory.
Each colour has a perceived meaning and the power to trigger various emotions and associations in our mind (i.e. beauty products will often use green or shades of brown, while wellness brands love to use pastel greens and blues for their visual branding).
So let’s look into that a little more:
Red: A strong colour has quite a mixed meaning. On one hand it stands for passion, love, power and strength. On the other it stimulates your attention, alerts of danger and is associated with war and anger. In both cases, this colour creates a sense of urgency and draws your attention. You can often see it used for entertainment brands, safety and danger notices, as well as sports or food.
Orange: Combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It stands for optimism, sunshine, fun and creativity. So it’s not surprising that many entertainment, leisure and travel brands often use it in their branding.
Yellow: The colour of sunshine and happiness. Often associated with joy, intellect, energy, spontaneity and enthusiasm. It’s used to stimulate and energize, but also to encourage positive energy release, especially when used in wellness and leisure industries.
Green: The colour that stands for life and nature and at its core, it symbolises growth, harmony, and balance. It relaxes, revitalises, rejuvenates and promotes growth. Therefore wellness, health and beauty brands often use it in their packaging design, and it is also widely used in renewable energy, education and environmental industries.
Blue: Trustworthy and loyal, this colour is often associated with wisdom, confidence and stability. Deeper tones or blue (i.e. Royal Blue) are often used in the finance, security and tech industries, while lighter blues (i.e. Sky or Baby Blue) can often be found in use by communications companies and baby products brands.
Purple: Let your imagination run free! Purple is a colour of creativity and imagination. It has a sense of mystery and spirituality that combines the stability of blue and the energy or red. It also has a very luxurious and royalty-like feel to it, and combines wisdom and power in one.
Pink: Often used for women’s and children’s products, as well as fashion and beauty. Pink is a colour of love, motherhood, compassion and creativity. It communicates positive energy and is considered nurturing and playful.
Brown: A warm colour that is associated with comfort, honesty, stability and nature. That’s why brown is often used in construction, transportation, agriculture and legal industries. It creates a sense of warmth and connection in a comforting and calm way.
Black: Discipline, authority, elegance – just some of the ways to describe one of my favourite colours. Black is rarely used on its own in branding as you usually find it in combination with other colours. It can be associated and interpreted very differently, depending on the colours you decide to pair it with.
Grey: Interesting fact, pure grey is the only colour that has no direct psychological properties – so it doesn’t trigger any particular emotion and avoids getting too much attention. But its conservative nature is also often used to portray sophistication and practicality (think of Apple’s move from their multi-coloured Apple logo to a grey one, for example). It is used in pretty much any industry, mostly in association with another primary colour.
White: A colour of purity, peace and simplicity, white is a soothing colour, that is also referred to as “the colour of perfection”. As it’s often used in combination with another colour, its meaning depends on its pairing colour partner. One rule of thumb though: white acts as an “amplifier” for any colour except for orange and pastels. Careful not to have too much of it in your branding or you risk the chance to be seen as cold, sterile and isolated ( hence, why it’s so prominent in branding for dental surgeries and hospitals, for example, but always in combination with hues of green, blue or pink)
FUN FACT: The “goldish-brown” colour that we use for One6Creative is a mix of brown with a touch of orange to represent comfort and security (the way we want our clients to feel when working with us), as well as fun and creativity (the way we want our brand to be perceived by our clients). Our charcoal colour stands for our elegance and discipline that we put at the core of our work… and our badass attitude that we’re not afraid to show 😉
That’s us of course, and now– over to you.
Now that you’ve answered some fundamental questions about your brand, and learned the psychology behind each of the colours – which do you think would best represent you and your brand?
FAVOURITE RESOURCES
Here are some of my favourite resources that I use for my clients, so if you wanted to get your creative juices flowing, start here:
My go-to resource for design, colour and style inspo has always been Pinterest! Create a secret board to gather images that reflect your chosen colours or get inspired by colour palettes created by other designers.
- ColorZilla Extension for Chrome
A simple yet handy free extension for your Chrome browser that allows you to pick a colour directly from your browser and copy its HEX code, amongst many other features!
An online color scheme that generates and creates beautiful colour combos! You can also paste in your primary colour and lock it down to see which colours would compliment it nicely if you’re feeling lost.
An awesome resource with thousands of trendy hand-picked colour palettes for designers and artists. This was a huge inspiration for some of my brand clients that needed that extra pop!
A more advanced online colour generator by Adobe – loved by many designers! A powerful way to generate beautiful palettes or get inspired by other people’s colour schemes by browsing through the Most Popular or Most Used categories (my fave thing to do!)
Think Pinterest and colour generator combined… yup, it’s THAT good! I absolutely love this website as it allows you to search for images based on your selection of colours. Super useful when you already have an idea of your colour palette but want to see it in action.
Aaaaand there we have it, friend!
This was Part 1 of this series on: “What Does Your Colour Palette Say About Your Brand?” – from the impact of colour, the psychology behind them, and some tools to help you get started with the process.
Next week, I’ll be sharing Part 2 of this series where I’ll be focusing more on the technicalities of creating a branded colour palette like a real PRO.
Was this helpful? If you found it valuable, I would love and appreciate it if you shared this with your friends and fellow entrepreneurs who would benefit this too! And if you have any further questions, suggestions, or would just like to say hey – I’d love to hear from you over on Instagram @One6Creative! That’s where I hang out the most!
