How to choose your brand colour palette

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How to choose your brand colour palette. When it comes to curating a consistent and cohesive brand for your business, you’ve got to have a strong colour palette! Colour conveys your values, makes you stand out and evokes different emotions.

Colour is the simplest way to showcase your brand across multiple platforms. From your social media posts, and website to your printed elements. These are all opportunities to use a distinct brand colour palette to give your business a strong visual presence.

Colours can you make you instantly recognisable, just think about the Cadbury brand, well known for their purple colour that they even tried to trademark it so no other chocolate company could use it.

Colour is a powerful marketing tool, and its important to choose the right palette. Selecting colours for your business can be overwhelming, so I’ve put together some simple steps to help you in the right direction.

How to choose your brand colour palette:

How to choose your brand colour palette

Step 01 – Establish your brand values and how you want people to feel

To create the perfect colour palette, it’s important to consider strategy and purpose about what your brand stands for and how you want your audience to feel. Colours are a powerful tool that affects our mood, emotions, experience and overall interactions with a brand. Consider these questions when choosing colours:

  1. What are your core values and drive behind your brand?
  2. IF your brand was a person, how would you describe their personality?
  3. What emotions do you want to evoke in your audience?
How to choose your brand colour palette

Step 02 – Consider your audience, who are they and what are they drawn to?

Every decision you make for your brand should consider your audience. If you want to deeply connect with them, your branding should be tailored to speak to them directly. Consider these questions when choosing colours:

  1. What is important to your audience?
  2. What brands are they drawn to?
How to choose your brand colour palette

Step 03 – Find colours that align with those values and emotions

Now for the fun part! Colours have psychology behind them that convey emotions and feelings that our brain associates with them. We need colour psychology to guide our colour selection. Pick colours that capture the values and emotions you’ve established for your business. Below are some examples of what colours’ meanings and associations:

Red – Red is the colour of extremes. It’s the colour of passionate love, seduction, romance, and adventure. Red brings text and images to the foreground.

Pink – Pink, a delicate colour that means sweet, nice, playful, cute, romantic, charming, feminine, and tenderness, is associated with bubble gum, flowers, babies, little girls, cotton candy, and sweetness. Pink is the colour of universal love of oneself and of others.

Purple – Purple combines the calm stability of blue and the fierce energy of red. Purple is often associated with royalty, nobility, luxury, power, and ambition. Purple also represents wealth, extravagance, creativity, wisdom, dignity, grandeur, devotion, peace, pride, mystery, independence, and magic.

Orange – Orange combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It is associated with joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation.

Yellow – Yellow is a colour associated with the sun. It symbolises optimism, energy, joy, happiness and friendship.

Green – Green is the colour of nature. It symbolises growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. Green has strong emotional correspondence with safety. Dark green is also commonly associated with money. Green is often used in decorating for its calming effect.

Blue – Blue is the colour of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolises trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven. Blue is considered beneficial to the mind and body. It produces a calming effect.

Black – Black is associated with power, mystery, strength, authority, elegance, formality, authority, and sophistication. Black is required for all other colours to have depth and variation of hue.

Gold – The colour gold is a cousin to the colour yellow and the colour brown. It is associated with illumination, love, compassion, courage, passion, magic, and wisdom. Gold is a precious metal that is associated with wealth, grandeur, and prosperity, as well as sparkle, glitz, and glamour.

White – White is purity, innocence, wholeness and completion. White is the most complete and pure, the colour of perfection. The psychological meaning of white is purity, innocence, wholeness and completion. In colour psychology, white is the colour of new beginnings.

I often start colour selections by looking at imagery first. Compiling a mood board of imagery that aligns with my client’s brand values and brief. I then pull colours inspired by the mood board.

Step 04 – create a flexible colour palette

When I put together the final colour palette for my clients, I make sure to allow flexibility. To do this, I select 2-3 complimentary colours that are more neutral and at least 2 colours that are for the primary use. The primary colours are typically more bold and bright in comparison to the complimentary colours.

Once you have discovered your perfect colour palette you can make an impact with all of your business decisions moving forward. It will give you a competitive advantage if you clearly articulate your brand colours to your audience.

Now you know how to choose your brand colour palette. If you’re don’t know where to start, you can claim my FREE Brand Checklist. Gain clarity for your business, audience, goals and more!

If you’re leaning towards hiring a designer and would like to learn more, reach out here to book a FREE Discovery Call to learn how I can help you establish a clear strategy and brand identity.

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