How To Choose The Best Colors For Your Brand
If you have ever been tasked with graphic design, one of the first and most important aspects to get right is the use of color. Unfortunately, it is also quite difficult to get right. With so many colors to choose from, and determining what best fits with your brand, it can be an intimidating task to accomplish. Thankfully, written below is everything you need to know about selecting colors that both reflect your brand and attract more customers.
Understanding Your Colors
The first step in finding your ideal color palette is, well, understanding color palettes! Different colors affect our brain in unique ways, which can be utilized by brands to convey their brand values. Let’s look at some colors and see what emotions they generally convey:
Red: While commonly used to tell of danger, red also provides a sense of excitement and energy. This is why brands like Netflix, Coca-Cola, or Target are so popular among consumers, because they offer excitement and intrigue to their customers.
Blue: What is the first brand you think of with blue as its primary color? Chances are, it’s either AT&T, Windows, Intel, or other popular tech-based companies. This is no coincidence: blue has strong implications of trust and security, which is a necessary emotion these companies want to convey to customers.
Yellow: Happiness, youth, and cheer are just a few of the many emotions drawn from the color yellow. With its vibrant pop and pleasant brightness, yellow stands out among the rest, which is why the golden arches of McDonald’s have stood the test of time and attracted millions.
With many more colors to examine, these are just a few of the more popular choices.
Selecting Your Colors
Once you’ve gotten an idea of the psychology behind different colors, now comes the fun part: choosing one (or two)! When creating a color palette for your brand, simplicity is key: find one primary color, one secondary/accent color, and one standard text color (usually black or grey).
Your primary color, also known as your core color, is the one that is most associated with your brand. Some examples of this include Starbuck’s green or Snapchat’s yellow. When looking for a primary color, select the one that best represents the emotions and ideas you want your audience to feel when engaging with your brand. If you want to evoke feelings of trust and security, blue would be a solid option; or maybe you want to offer excitement and energy to your customers, which is where red shines.
Once you’ve found your primary color, we move on to the secondary/accent colors. When selecting these, it is best to aim for two to four secondary colors in your brand. These colors serve to compliment your primary color, and can go in a variety of different directions. Here are a few color schemes that you can choose from to find the best secondary colors.
Analogous color scheme: These colors are similar variants of your primary color. So, if your primary color is blue, good secondary colors for this scheme would be purple and green.
Monochromatic color scheme: Secondary colors in this scheme use different shades and tints of your primary color. One example of this is using red as your primary color and maroon as your secondary color.
Contrasting color scheme: As you may assume based on the name, the secondary colors in this scheme would be colors that are opposite your primary color on the color wheel, like blue and orange, or (most famously) white and black.
Lastly, we move on to neutral colors. While it may be easy to overlook this aspect, neutral colors are important in the communication side of your brand palette. Neutral colors can be used in your written text and backgrounds of assets, and are usually white, black, or shades of gray.
Applying Your Colors
Now that you understand how brand colors work, and what colors best fit your brand, we move on to implementing your colors in different designs. To help limit confusion between your employees and audience, as well as increasing your brand consistency, it is best to create guidelines for each of your branding needs. Make sure these guidelines are accessible to all members of your design team and stakeholders so they know what colors to implement and where to implement them. Some crucial areas your brand colors would appear include:
Logo
Emails
Website
Advertisements
Social Media
Don’t be afraid to experiment and try different colors across different formats, like social media pages and handouts/fliers. Just make sure you have a folder to organize your various designs.
Enzo Lux Media’s Graphic Design Services
If all of this sounds a tad overwhelming, Enzo Lux Media is here to help! We understand you have enough on your plate already, which is why we have an Unlimited Graphic Design service for all of your graphic design needs. We deliver quality services in social media posts, handouts, notes, slides, teaching materials, booklets, website edits, and much more! If this sounds like just what you need, just scroll on down to our “Unlimited Graphic Design” page, fill out a quick form, and we’ll get started on providing you with the best graphic designs for your brand!
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