Colors are quick to communicate crucial information, from a construction worker's bright helmet to a bride's spotless gown. Colour palettes are an important part of any company's branding initiatives because of their strong and immediate influence.
The color scheme you choose for your brand will be reflected in all of your marketing assets, from how you design your own logo to how your website is laid up, and so on. Consistent usage of brandcolors across all platforms could provide your company a more cohesive look and feel, making it more memorable and recognizable.
What are Brand Colors?
A brand color palette is a collection of five to ten colors that are used to represent a specific company. Consistent and intelligent use of brandcolors helps boost brand awareness and recognition.
Brand colors are commonly used in the following areas: a company's logo, website color scheme, social media channels, business card design, and print and digital advertisements. For brick-and-mortar businesses, brandcolors can also be used in-store design, employee uniforms, product packaging, and other areas.
How to Pick Your Brand Colors?
This comprehensive guide covers everything from what brand colors are all about to a step-by-step procedure for choosing your own to help your business stand out with the proper brandcolors.
1. Create Your Brand's Identity
Image is taken from Visme
Your brand's colors are a reflection of its identity. As a result, your color palette should be consistent with your beliefs and the messaging you want to convey.
You must first develop your brand identity for this purpose. A good technique for this is to create a list of adjectives that characterize your company's personality as if you were describing a person. Consider how you want the brand to be seen and what distinguishes it from the competition.
The following spectrum of brand identification features is essential for developing a brand and will help you more readily locate the core of your brand.
2. Explore the Meanings of Different Colors
Now that you've established your brand's personality, it's time to choose the colors that will allow it to shine. While doing so, it is worthwhile to research color psychology principles for common color meanings.
However, it is also crucial to note that color is not a precise science, and there is no formula for determining which color means what. This is where color combinations come into play, as they aid in creating a design that invokes specific emotions through their juxtaposition.
Consider the difference in the meaning of the hue blue when matched with gold - invoking images of grandeur and luxury - vs the same blue when coupled with pink - which tends to feel much more whimsical.
Brandcolors can have diverse connotations based on the colors they are combined with, as well as context and cultural connotations. However, there are distinct color usage trends dependent on the industry. Here's a quick summary of common brandcolors by a few major industries to help you choose the proper color palette for your business:
- Food: Many foods and restaurant businesses use warm hues like red, orange, and yellow to capture attention and elicit appetite. Other food companies use green to promote a connection with nutrition and well-being, while blue and pink are used for sweets and desserts.
Image is taken from Strikingly user’s website
- Health & Wellbeing: Blue is commonly used by health and wellness companies to represent cleanliness, reliability, and responsibility. Other common brandcolors include green, which represents nature and well-being, and orange, which can conjure up images of life and energy.
Image is taken from Strikingly user’s website
- Fashion and Beauty: In the fashion and beauty sectors, black is frequently used for refinement and glamour, while warm hues like red, orange, and pink are used for passion, confidence, and excitement.
Image is taken from Strikingly user’s website
- High-tech: Blue is a popular choice for tech organizations because it represents trust, intelligence, and efficiency. Other hues are orange, which represents friendliness and optimism, and purple, which represents quality and innovation.
Image is taken from Strikingly user’s website
3. Look for Inspiration
Look for color ideas as a final step before creating your brandcolors. Examine your competitors' palettes and try to figure out what makes them so effective. Consider what you can learn from their color selections and how you might set yourself apart from the competition.
Online color palette generators are another wonderful source of inspiration, where you can obtain ideas for unusual color pairings and fascinating colors.
To get your creative juices flowing, we've compiled a list of 10 popular brandcolors and examined what we appreciate about them.
4. Decide on a Primary Color
Image is taken from Visme
The primary color, or core color, of your brand, is the one that is most closely connected with it. Consider Tiffany's distinctive blue or Pinterest's crimson.
Look for a single color that best embodies your business based on color meanings for your core color. To find the perfect effect, try with several hues and tints of the color you want to use, ranging from lush and dark to delicate and pastel to bright neon.
5. Select Your Secondary Brandcolors
Once you've decided on your primary color, choose two to four complementary hues. These colors will complement your primary one and can appear next to it or on their own. Secondary colors for a brand might go in a few different directions:
- Analogous Color Scheme: These are variations of your primary color. This means that if your primary color is bright red, you can add additional warm colors from the same color family (such as orange and yellow). Analogous color palettes are typically pleasing and harmonious in appearance.
- Monochromatic Color Scheme: This consists of several tones and tints of your primary color. For instance, if blue is your primary color, your secondary colors can be pale blue and dark blue. Monochromatic color schemes can help to amplify and enhance your primary color.
- Contrasting Color Schemes: Contrasting brandcolors are either complementary colors (sitting across from each other on the color wheel) or a grouping of bright, equally vibrant hues. This color scheme can make your brand's colors stand out and give off a vibrant and modern vibe.
6. Use Neutral Hues
It's tempting to focus on the main colors and ignore the neutrals when designing your brand colors. However, neutral colors are significant since they control the majority of your communication (for example, the color of your written content) and will show in the background of the majority of your assets.
Neutral colors are typically white or black, with a few hues of grey thrown in for good measure.
7. Put Your Brand's Colors to the Test
Image is taken from Visme
Once you've decided on your colors, combine them and test them in a few different combinations to ensure they complement one another and express the message you intended.
To make your website more accessible, you should also evaluate your palette to ensure that they are plainly legible together. There are numerous online tools and browser plugins available for testing brandcolors for accessibility. Two such tools that we recommend are Contrast Checker and Color Contrast Analyzer.
What Do the Various Brandcolors Mean?
Image is taken from Venngage
We've covered the basics for brandcolors; now let's go into the hard facts of color meanings (or at least some guidelines). Here's a rundown of brand color meanings and how different branding colors can affect people:
- Red – Red represents passion, enthusiasm, and rage. It can denote significance and compel attention.
- Orange – The color orange represents liveliness, vitality, and friendliness. It is energising and energising.
- Yellow- conveys happiness, youth, and optimism, yet it can also appear attention-grabbing or inexpensive.
- Green - implies stability, wealth, expansion, and a sense of connectedness to nature.
- Light Blue – A light blue exudes calm, trust, and openness. It can also represent innocence.
- Dark Blue – The color dark blue represents professionalism, security, and formality. It is mature and reliable.
- Purple – Purple can be associated with monarchy, creativity, and elegance.
- Pink – Pink symbolizes femininity, youth, and innocence. It spans from contemporary to opulent.
- Brown – Brown produces a rustic, earthy, vintage look or feel.
- White – The color white is associated with cleanliness, virtue, health, and simplicity. It can range from low-cost to high-end.
- Gray – Gray represents neutrality. It can have a quiet, classic, solemn, secretive, or mature appearance.
- Black – The color black conjures a strong, smart, edgy, opulent, and modern vibe.
How can Colors be Used on Strikingly Websites?
Image is taken from Strikingly
Our most recent templates allow you to modify sophisticated styles! These themes, such as Remotejoy, Interior, Meditteranean, Andrea, Figapps, and others, provide many more possibilities for you to personalize and play with.
- Click "STYLES" in your site editor. A style panel with headers and navigations, sections, and buttons will appear, as shown below. You can change to any of the templates above if you don't see it.
- Rotate through the background color selections by clicking the square here for areas that do not have a background image menu.
- Background color options will appear in the suggested image selections for sections that have a background image menu.
Conclusion
It is critical for your company's success to have a distinct brand identity. Remember that the impact of your brandcolors is determined by the style and design in which they are employed, as well as the color combinations you select. This is a condensed version; our relationship with color is considerably more complex—for example, too much yellow can produce worry. So take some time to get to know your brand's personality and select brand colors that match its own identity.
