How To choose your brand colors
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Picking your brand colors is one of the most important decisions in the branding process.
Often businesses, especially when they first start out, just pick colors they like with no consideration to strategy and how the colors reflect their business.
So how do you pick the right brand colors for your business?
First let’s discuss why color is so important in your branding.
Let’s start out with some good ol stats!
According to a Tailor Brands article color improves brand recognition by up to 80%. This means customers are 80% more likely to identify with you if you consistently use the same colors within your branding.
Color’s alone can influence up to 90% of an initial impression according to Review42.
This is why understanding color psychology is a very important step when thinking of your brand colors.
When you choose the appropriate color for your target audience and you use these colors consistently it allows your audience to trust, know and like your brand.
And that’s what we all want…right?
When thinking about our brand colors we want to put some strategy behind our color decision. Let’s break down some factors to consider when choosing your brand colors so you can mix strategy with design for your desired outcome.
Defining your brand personality
Before thinking of colors I want you to think about your brand personality. I took a masterclass where this one brand identity expert said she likes to ask her clients, “If your business was a celebrity who would they be and why?”
Who would you choose?
There are many factors to a brand personality, but I want to focus on understanding your company’s values along with your target audience.
What are your company’s values?
Think about why you started this business and what drives you when working and interacting with your target audience.
How do you want your business to be represented in the market?
Thinking of your values and how you want your audience to interact with your brand go hand in hand.
Ask yourself, how do I want my audience to feel when they interact with my business?
Understanding the feelings of our audience will help us when we move on to the color psychology phase of understanding how to choose your brand colors.
Before we break that down let’s understand our target audience.
Who is your target audience?
Before we do anything in our business no matter what it is we should always understand our target audience.
Sometimes this is your ideal client or if you are already established with clients coming in, look at the similarities in those clients.
Are they mostly male or female?
What age range are they?
Do they have common personality traits?
Do they strongly believe in your core values?
I was working with one client and asked who their ideal client was and they gave me a very broad group of people. This client was someone that did leadership training and workshops for companies around her community.So I asked her, “Who is the person that makes the decision to hire you to train their employees with your leadership training?”
She answered, “The managers or owners of the companies.”
I followed with, “Are the majority of these people male or female?”
“Actually they are mostly all male,” was her answer.
This allowed us to understand that the majority of people coming into contact with her business were going to be men. This is something very important to understand when making any branding and/or design decisions in your business.
Now that we know our values and our target audience let’s look at color psychology.
Breaking down color psychology
Using color psychology to choose your brand colors can help you evoke certain emotions and create a strong visual identity that resonates with your target audience.
Red
Red is associated with energy, passion, and excitement. It can also evoke a sense of urgency, making it a good choice for brands that want to create a sense of urgency or excitement around their products or services.
You also want to note that red doesn’t guarantee a positive response. It can be an intense color to some and may be best used in a subtle way or by choosing softer shades of red.
Blue
Blue is often associated with trust, reliability, and professionalism. It can also evoke a sense of calm and tranquility, making it a good choice for brands that want to create a sense of stability and dependability.
Green:
Green is associated with growth, nature, and harmony. It can also evoke a sense of calm and balance, making it a good choice for brands that want to create a sense of health, wellness, and sustainability.
Yellow:
Yellow is associated with optimism, happiness, and warmth. It can also evoke a sense of creativity and playfulness, making it a good choice for brands that want to create a sense of fun and excitement.
Purple:
Purple is associated with creativity, imagination, and luxury. It can also evoke a sense of spirituality and mystery, making it a good choice for brands that want to create a sense of sophistication and elegance.
Orange:
Orange is associated with energy, enthusiasm, and warmth. It can also evoke a sense of playfulness and creativity, making it a good choice for brands that want to create a sense of fun and excitement.
Black:
Black is associated with power, mystery and formality. It can also evoke a sense of authority and sophistication, making it a good choice for brands that want to create a sense of luxury and timelessness.
White:
White is associated with purity, cleanliness and simplicity. It can also evoke a sense of innocence and minimalism, making it a good choice for brands that want to create a sense of wellness and honesty.
Remember that these associations are not absolute and can vary based on culture, personal preferences, and other factors. It's important to consider your brand's personality, values, and target audience when choosing your brand colors, and test your color choices with your audience to ensure they resonate with them.
How do I choose a color palette?
Now that you understand your brand personality, core values and target audience let’s focus on the color palette as a whole.
Follow these steps when it comes to creating or looking for your color palette:
Step 1: Think about color psychology when choosing your colors within your color palette.
Step 2: Choose a primary color that represents your brand and is easily recognizable.
Step 3: Then choose complementary colors that work well with your primary color for a cohesive look.
Step 4: Think about how you are primarily using these colors. Be mindful of colors on different screens when thinking digital. Tip: Test your colors with the brightness on your computer. Does it still look good when the brightness is all the way down?
Step 5: Test out your color palette. A fun way to do this is to go into Canva and pick templates relevant to your business and switch out your colors. Does it go well?
Step 6: Ask your audience. Do a poll on your stories within Instagram on color palette options…which is better? It’s alway better to get actual feedback from your target audience.
Where can I find color palettes?
You can hop on Pinterest and type in color palette or be more specific like green and orange color palette and see what sticks out to you.
Check out these instagram accounts I like to get inspiration from:
My favorite resource for color palettes.
If you haven’t heard of Coolors you are going to be very excited about this! Coolors is a website that helps generate color palettes.
They also have an option to add in a photo and it will generate a color palette from the photo.
I like to do this as a jumping off point sometimes. I might not find the whole color palette but I can find some really good colors this way.
Conclusion:
When choosing your brand colors for your business just think about your brand personality, core values and target audience. From there understand the importance of color with color psychology. Then go have fun with choosing your color palette.
Don’t over think this process too much. It is an important step, but don’t let it intimidate you and if you are struggling go to your audience and ask them!
No audience? Do a little digging on your ideal target audience what type of similarities are there in the brands they choose to follow? Get in the mind of your ideal target audience and have fun with it!
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