How to choose your right brand color?
- · Recognize what your brand is about so you can align with relevant colors.
- · Embrace color theory to understand what colors mean.
- · Think about your competitors so you don’t look the same.
- · Don’t be afraid to experiment.
- · Identify your brand essence.
- · Consider the Targeted Audience.
Colors elicit emotions & feelings, plus they convey certain information. Did you know 93 percent of shoppers make purchase decisions based on color and visual appearance?
Every brand targets the specific audience based on their location, age, interests, behavior, buying activities, gender, etc. Brand colors are powerful in helping customers decide whether or not they want to engage.
For small business owners who can’t afford professional branding, the best thing to do is to keep your branding simple. When choosing a color palette you can keep it simple by limiting it to no more than four colors. A well-developed color palette might have more than that, but for non-designers that can be overwhelming. The more colors you introduce, the more potential there is for them to clash, and the harder it is to implement them consistently. As a small business owner, you already have enough to stress about and your color palette shouldn’t be one of them. This article will walk you through the process of choosing a color palette for the branding of your small business.
Where your brand color should appear?
- — Logo, website & emails, social media advertising, in store, stationery, staff uniforms, events.
While building a brand, your color palette is one of your most crucial considerations along with your tone of voice, fonts & brand values, it helps people understand who you are & why you’re are here which in turn attracts the right customers to your brand.
About hue, value & saturation : Hue is essentially a pure color, without white or black added to it. Value is how light or dark a color is. When black is added to a hue, it’s referred to as a shade. When white is added, it’s referred to as a tint.
Choose Your Color Palette — You now have enough inspiration and understanding of color theory to choose your color palette. Keep the following guidelines in mind as you do so.
Consider using some of the colors from the companies that your ideal client likes. Try to stay away from the colors of your competitors. Include different values in your palette. Be sure to include a color that is dark enough for text. Include a neutral color or two. It can be useful to have both a light and dark neutral.
Follow your gut! This might not be the most practical advice, but I find that most clients already have an idea of the colors they’d like to use. As long as they will appeal to the right audience and set you apart from the competition, then go for it!
Once you’ve determined your color palette, make sure to use it on all of your branded material and don’t use any other colors. This will create consistency in your brand and make it memorable to potential customers.
Consider color psychology
As you do your research, you’ll notice whether you’re drawn to warm or cool colors. The connotations and moods evoked by the hues you’ve chosen should also reflect your brand values and personality.
Color theory is the idea that any hue can be linked to a mood or value. It’s also known as “color psychology.” Some of these links are instinctive, whereas others are a little more subtle. Whichever you choose, they can all have a big impact on how your brand is perceived.
Here’s a rundown of some common colors and their associations:
Yellow
This sunny hue is on the warm side of the color wheel and is associated with positivity. Think of the golden arches on the side of a Happy Meal.
Green
Green is evocative of growth and nature — a link Tropicana has used to its advantage in its logo.
Blue
Blue has the benefit of projecting calmness, making it a sign of stability — useful if you’re a business such as PayPal, Visa or Samsung and want to convey reliability.
Black
While black is a risky color, thanks to its associations with all things morbid, it also denotes sophistication. This link has been harnessed by numerous high-end brands, including Prada, Chanel and Gucci.
Red
Fiery hues denote excitement, passion and energy. Red Bull, and their association with high-adrenaline sports, are a great example of a brand that has aligned color connotations seamlessly with their values.
Orange
A mixture of red and yellow, orange is an invigorating, warm color that inspires creativity (think of the classic covers of your favorite Penguin books). Strangely, it can also create feelings of hunger or thirst, as it’s a common color in fruits and other food.
Purple
Deeper, vibrant shades of purple generate associations with luxury, richness and quality. This indulgent hue has been used most famously by Cadbury’s chocolate, but also by premium card makers, Hallmark.
Once you’ve identified a dominant color that projects the right image for your brand, you can decide which accent colors will best complement it to make up your complete palette. This is where the color wheel, along with color theory, really come into play.
Color terminology explained
If you’re not a designer, color terminology can be like reading another language. Here are the definitions of some common color terms you might come across when building your palette:
Color wheel
A visual that demonstrates the relationship between the 12 primary (red, blue, yellow), secondary (purple, green and orange) and tertiary colors. This is a great tool for finding contrasting and complementary colors.
Hue
One of the 12 single colors found on the color wheel.
Tint, shade or tone
The different ways of transforming hues into a variety of colors. A tint is a hue mixed with white, while a shade is a hue mixed with black. A tone mixes a hue with black and white.
Creating a color scheme
Once you’ve got to grips with the terminology around color and with the color wheel, you can start using your knowledge to build out schemes. A color scheme is simply the way colors are combined or arranged, here’s all about color wheel :
Monochromatic
A palette comprising just one hue, with different tones or shades. Think Oreo’s different shades of blue.
Analogous
A palette made from colors that appear next to each other on the color wheel. These combinations tend to be particularly harmonious, as seen in agricultural firm John Deere’s palette of greens and yellow.
Complementary
A color scheme comprising colors that are opposite each other on the wheel. If used on top of each other — for example, by applying red text to a green background — they will clash. But when used side-by-side they can help you create stand-out. Think 7-Up’s logo.
Compound
Also known as ‘split-complementary,’ this palette takes two adjacent colors on the wheel, and matches them with a color on the opposite side.
Tetradic
A tetrad is a color scheme, a special variant of the dual color scheme, with the equal distance between all colors. All four colors are distributed evenly around the color wheel, causing there is no clear dominance of one color.
Triadic
A palette built from three colors taken from evenly-spaced parts of the wheel. Burger King’s red, blue and yellow is a classic example.
- So now you are all set to choose your right brand color, wish you good luck for your new brand.