How To Pick A Brand Color Palette That’s Unique
Whether you’re just getting your business off the ground or skipped branding in the past, finally learning how to pick a brand color palette will pay off big dividends.
The reason why is simple. Color is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal when developing your brand.
Unlike elements of your branding like your business logo or wordmark, which tend to be reproduced in a single format with only minor variations, a palette of branded colors can add value in almost everything your company does.
Similar to branded typefaces, color can seamlessly influence everything from the front page of your website to print materials to merch to physical locations. All of this creates an impression that your brand is consistent, professional, and expensive.
If you design your brand’s color palette right the first time, it should be easy for you to ensure that every photo, pamphlet, and email that your company sends paints a consistent emotional picture in the minds of your clients. It might be subtle, but color is persuasive.
But establishing a quality brand color palette requires more than using the eyedropper tool in Photoshop on your existing logo design.
It requires interrogating both why a certain set of colors can promote the ideals of your brand as well as understanding how to carefully control the kinds of colors your brand uses. Especially for novice designers, this can be a significant challenge.
Thankfully, though, you’re not alone.
Just follow the instructions in this article to learn how to pick a brand color palette and you’ll be well on your way to making your brand look effortlessly more consistent and professional than your competitors.
How To Pick A Brand Color Palette
Step 1. Understand Your Brand
Whenever I write articles about improving your brand’s aesthetic and professionalism, I start brand understanding.
But I think it’s perhaps one of the most overlooked parts of brand design.
You need to start your process by knowing who your brand is and how they relate to your consumers.
From a first impression to a repeat purchase, branding is a critical part of starting and maintaining a relationship with consumers.
Your design should aspire toward furthering that relationship in a specific, intentional way.
You need to know what it is you’re trying to accomplish, how you’ll measure success, and why success is helpful to you as you scale your enterprise.
This critical understanding about the relationships that your brand is trying to embody should directly inform your design process at every stage.
A brand that knows that consumers are more likely to be persuaded to purchase from a friendly-looking company will be far less likely to enforce a sleek, austere all-black-and-white aesthetic than one trying to appear premium and untouchable.
With this, we start to veer into what many marketers refer to as “color psychology”, which I’ll present with a caveat. Anyone who tells you that you can conjure up specific, consistent emotions in consumers by presenting them with a red or a green is lying to you.
Our relationship with color is far more complicated than that. As individuals, as members of society, and as members of consumer culture, color means different things to people in different contexts.
However, a deep understanding of how brands in your industry and beyond have leveraged colors to create cultural associations is still extremely important.
Perhaps nothing about the color blue “naturally” makes people feel more relaxed. But the fact that a vast number of leading tech firms use blue logos creates a very real social reality of branding that your color palette should address.
Is it better for your brand to try to “look the part” or carefully break conventions?
Step 2. Use Great Resources
At this point, you’ve leveraged a deep understanding of the type of impression you want to create. You’ve also considered how well other brands have tried to create that impression and have settled on a rough direction for your color palette.
Great — what now?
Speaking personally, selecting colors is something I used to really struggle with.
I watched designers online simple pluck gorgeous shades from the color wheel. Then I’d scratch my head wondering how they identified the perfect tones to fit the mood they wanted to create.
I got around my lack of skill by “borrowing” colors from photos and screenshots. Using the Eyedropper tool in Photoshop got me a close-enough color until I had what I needed. (Read these Photoshop tips for beginners article for more.)
Especially for beginner designers, this is an approach I absolutely recommend. While you shouldn’t straight-up plagiarize colors from other brands or logos you like, grabbing them from photography or art that speaks to your brand’s ideals is a great way to ensure you’ll be creating a similar mood.
If you’re looking for something a little more traditional, there’s plenty of other great color-identifying resources available as well.
One of my all-time most utilized is Google’s Color Tool. This tool can help you select not just a primary tone, but also secondary and contrast shades.
Unlike a more typical color wheel, it also limits its specific hues down to Google’s wide variety of curated colors. This is often diverse enough to get close to what I’m looking for in a variety of use cases.
Additionally, there’s plenty of color inspiration on social media. A quick scroll through the very aptly-titled prettycolors.tumblr.com can provide you with the perfect jumping off point.
Step 3. Build for Many Use Cases
This is where things can start to get a little more complicated.
You’ve selected a great tone for your primary brand color — the type of color that’s used on main logos and typefaces.
But now it’s time to identify a spectrum of complementary and contrasting tones that make that color useful.
After all, just think about all the cases in which you’ll want your brand colors to be useful. Beyond your logo, there’s your web design color palette, print design colors, photo filtration, typographic hierarchies, and on and on.
Thankfully there’s some overlap regarding what colors are necessary to plan for when building a brand color palette.
You’ll at least want black (or off-black) for type, white (or off-white) for a variety of things on dark backgrounds, one to two complimentary “primary” brand colors, one to two neutral grey background tones, and about one contrast color.
Obviously, many specific brands will have other specific needs. But for many companies, a palette no bigger than that would provide options for most design scenarios.
One thing to definitely avoid is going way off the deep end with additional colors in your brand palette, unless they’re demonstrably necessary on a regular basis. Too much detail at this stage can create tons of confusion and result in wishy-washy, hard-to-understand design down the line.
Instead, try to stick to one simpler color scheme.
Step 4. Keep It Consistent
At this point, you’ve really done the majority of what you set out to.
You’ve outfitted your brand with dozens of excellent color selections that can apply to a variety of usage scenarios.
Ideally, you’ve also created a document where the hexadecimal and RGB codes for these colors are instantly accessible. And, you wisely shared this document with other members of your team.
Now comes the hardest part: the follow through.
Especially if you’re trying to retrofit an existing brand with outstanding new collateral, it can be a real challenge to make the requisite adjustments to your internal processes and habits that enable your great new color palette to shine through.
But this challenge is worth it.
Outstanding brand design does more than make a positive impression with consumers. It builds brands and converts on-the-fence consumers into customers.
Moreover, design practices that boil down to convenience rather than intention are almost always going to look unintentionally, unprofessionally created.
Great brand design demonstrates precision, an eye for detail, and an obsession with quality to your consumers.
In my view, if you’re willing to spend the extra time ironing bugs out of your software or rigorously testing your product to make sure that it works as you’ve intended, taking a shortcut on the design side of things only serves to minimize your own hard work.
And once you’ve made maintaining a great color palette a habit, you can be confident about your branding. This a simple and effective way to take one extra step ahead of your competition.
Need a helping hand as you craft your new brand color palette? Robben Media has graphic designers who are ready to deliver exactly what you’re looking for (even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for).
This article was written by the professional graphic designer, Alex Winzenread.