Branding colours: Everything you need to choose your brand’s colour palette

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

Chase. Citibank. Barclay’s. Bank of America. All use blue as one of their dominant branding colours. Even Australian financial institutions like ANZ and AMP use blue. Obviously, it’s more than a coincidence that these money-related companies all chose blue for their brand identity. So what do they all know that you don’t?

Image of assorted blue logos from famous and trusted brands.

According to this Indian Express article, consumers view brands that use blue as more eco-friendly than other colours, even green. The question our articles answer is – why?

The short answer is they know how to combine colour theory and meaning with business. When building a brand, you need to understand how to use all the tools at your disposal, and that’s just what we’re going to discuss today.

In this article, we’ll run through everything you need to know about branding colours. We’ll touch on concepts from artistic disciplines like colour theory and art history and merge them with the best practices for branding, marketing and what a company needs to survive in today’s business landscape. But first things first, you need to understand just why branding colours matter so much.

Table of contents

 

Why branding colours matter

Different branding colors shown in a rainbow of different logos.

“Colours, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.” -Pablo Picasso

What do you think of when you hear the word “love?” Whether positive or negative, it most likely conjures a stronger emotional response than when you hear a phrase like “bike rack.”

Emotions are powerful and (whether we like it or not) drive our decision making. As a small business, you want to cultivate a strong emotional connection with your customers. The problem is you can’t tell your company’s entire life story in a logo or storefront but branding colours provide a shortcut straight to your customers’ hearts.

One of the most famous colour theorists, Faber Birren, wrote extensively on the link between colours and our emotional state, particularly in his book Color Psychology and Color Theory. Just like the words “love” and “bike rack” elicit different emotions, colours like red and blue both create different human responses as well. Even more interesting, the same colours tend to provoke similar responses in different people; in other words, yellow evokes similar feelings in people from Tamworth to Timbuktu. This extends even to shades of individual colours, so deep dark blue and light sky blue will also have different effects.

Page from A New Practical Treatise on the Three Primitive Colours Assumed as a Perfect System of Rudimentary Information by Charles Hayter.

Colour theory is intrinsically tied to mankind’s history, as you can see from the page in an 1826 manuscript by Charles Hayter.

Colour theory goes a lot deeper than “pink is a pretty colour.” Psychologists link it to the very evolution of humans; connections with certain colours developed after years of associating them with particular objects. A blood red, for example, puts people on alert for danger nearby; the browns of dirt and rotten food tend to be unappetising.

This isn’t always accurate after all, farmers (and chocolate lovers) might love the colour brown, but when considering millions of years of biological conditioning, it’s easy to see how affiliations to colours goes beyond mere preference something humanity has known for quite some time now.

And let’s not forget the cultural associations. A clear example is the way Americans associate green with money because the currency is the colour green. People from other countries wouldn’t necessarily understand the phrase “spending greens”; a company “going green,” however, would resonate with most people.

Even the most cold-hearted business owner can’t ignore the science behind the psychological effects of branding colours. With mountains of evidence, it’s not a question of do brand colours work?, but how do I make brand colours work for my business?

Application of branding colours

According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, how consumers feel about a brand has more pull than what they think about a brand. Pair that with the fact that we know certain colours evoke certain emotions, and voila, your brand colours have the ability to impact your sales or performance even more than the products you offer.

Moreover, repetition of the same colour can strengthen brand awareness. When was the last time you saw a Coke can that wasn’t red? (Certainly, the marketing world learned its lesson from Heinz’s tragic foray into purple ketchup.) Given enough exposure, colours become part of a brand, so you want to encourage this association by using your brand colours consistently.

Just for the sake of organisation, here are the most common areas you’ll be using your branding colours:

  • logo
  • website
  • storefront
  • in-store design
  • staff uniforms
  • advertisements
Photograph of the interior of Best Buy.

Best Buy chooses a smart colour scheme of a dominant blue and passive yellow, a complementary pair as we explain below. Blue carpets, blue walls, blue shirts for employees…one glance at this picture and you know you’re not in RadioShack.

By using the same colours in all your business ventures, you strengthen your brand’s association with those colours and, by extension, strengthen brand awareness as a whole.

What this all amounts to, at least for branding, is that you must choose your branding colours carefully as they’ll have a direct influence on your brand identity. Pink may be your personal favorite colour, but it might be the worst for your business goals. But before you even get into which colours you want to represent you, first you must decide your ideal brand personality.

How to determine your brand identity

Red has done wonders for Target, who want their brand personality to be energetic, youthful and loud. But red wouldn’t work for a company like Casper Mattresses, who cultivate a brand personality that’s calm and relaxed, denoting a good night’s sleep.

picture of spectrum of brand personality traits

Choosing your branding colours is easy if you know what you’re trying to communicate. One of the earliest steps in building a brand is determining your brand personality. Essentially, you want to think of your company like a person who are they? What’s important to them?

Once you established what your brand personality goals are, how do you determine which colours will work best? It starts with first learning the emotional associations of each colour.

What do different branding colours mean?

We’ve spoken enough about the abstracts for branding colours let’s dive into the hard facts of colour meanings (or at least some guidelines). Here’s a summary of brand colour meanings and the effect that different branding colours can have on people:

  • Red stands for passion, excitement and anger. It can signify importance and command attention.
  • Orange stands for playfulness, vitality and friendliness. It is invigorating and evokes energy.
  • Yellow evokes happiness, youth and optimism, but it can also seem attention-grabbing or affordable.
  • Green evokes stability, prosperity, growth and a connection to nature.
  • Light blue exudes tranquility, trust and openness. It can also signify innocence.
  • Dark blue stands for professionalism, security and formality. It is mature and trustworthy.
  • Purple can signify royalty, creativity and luxury.
  • Pink stands for youth and innocence. It ranges from modern to luxurious.
  • Brown creates a rugged, earthy, old-fashioned look or feel.
  • White evokes virtue, health or simplicity. It can range from affordable to high-end.
  • Grey stands for neutrality. It can look subdued, classic, serious, mysterious or mature.
  • Black evokes a powerful, sophisticated, edgy, luxurious and modern feeling.

Keep in mind that the effect of your branding colours depends on the style and design they are used in, as well as the colour combinations you choose. This is an abridged version; our connection to colour goes a lot deeper than this for example, too much yellow can actually cause anxiety.

Screenshot from the website of Chase Bank.

When it comes to handing over all your money to someone, trust is paramount. That’s why there’s so much blue on the website for Chase Bank, and other financial institutions.

If you’re going for a single-colour brand, the hard part is already over. But for most of you, you’ll want a more involved colour scheme with a variety of colours. As if choosing one colour wasn’t hard enough, now you have to choose multiple colours and make sure they combine in the way you want.

Formula for building a brand colour scheme

Obviously, there’s no one right way to pick your branding colour scheme. When dealing with abstracts like brand identity, it’s difficult and unwise to ascribe hard and fast rules. That said, the process can be daunting and confusing, so a little guidance is helpful. Here, we’re going to explain a process for building a colour scheme that you can use more as a framework, and less as step-by-step instructions.

Diagram showing how colour match your brand personality traits

1. Plan on choosing 3 colours

Your base, accent and neutral colour. Brand colour schemes can have between 1-4 colours depending on the type (see below), but even monochrome schemes, where there is only one colour, will require some variation in hues for different purposes and accents.

2. Choose your base

Of all your brand’s personality traits, which one is most important? Your base colour should reflect not only your brand personality’s most dominant trait, but also appeal to the target audience you’re trying to reach. You’ll choose the remaining colours based on how well they match with this one.

3. Choose your accent

Your accent will be the colour you use the most after your base colour. This is a bit trickier than choosing your base colour because there are more restrictions aside from matching a brand personality trait, your accent colour must also pair visually with your base colour and be appeasing your audience.

4. Choosing your neutral

Your neutral colour will most likely be a background colour, something chosen to avoid attention. Typically, these are different shades of gray, but beige, white and off-whites work well too. Black is also an option, but be careful  it tends to dominate any colour scheme it’s a part of.

Colour palette for the beer brand Coors

Classic Coors is an affordable beer that appeals to a more mature, masculine customer. They use a dark blue to indicate maturity. While the light yellow acts as a great contrast against the dark blue.

Throughout the process of choosing your branding colours, you have to keep in mind the end goal what kind of colour scheme are you using? Typically, brands use one of these common brand colour schemes:

The main schemes for branding colors, shown on a color wheel.

When choosing branding colours, the colour wheel is one of your greatest aids. The locations of colours to one another on the wheel.

  • Monochromatic — When you have one personality trait that you want to focus on, a monochrome scheme will emphasise the meaning of that one brand colour. While great for minimalist brands, the challenge here is differentiating the hues and shades enough that your sight doesn’t become visually stunted.
  • Analogous — Colours next to each other on the colour wheel have harmonious relations, since adjacent colours usually have similar emotional connotations. Analogous schemes are safe bets, but as such not the best for standing out or drawing attention.
  • Complementary — Colour complements (or opposites) are colours directly across from one another on the colour wheels. Because they’re opposites, they bring out the best in each other when paired; you see complementary colours a lot in sports teams. Complementary colour schemes are great for dynamic, stimulating visuals, but be careful of copying another brand since they’re so popular.
  • Triadic — A stable branding colour scheme, triadic colours draw in equal parts for three different sections of the colour wheel. Triadic schemes are stable like analogous themes but offer a more stimulating variety like complementary schemes. The hardest part is getting the three colours to coincide with the traits of your brand identity.

How your branding colours combine will come up again and again in many different aspects of your business. Your brand colour scheme determines the look of your website, logo, store design, advertisements…and it even trickles down into minor appearances like your social media account. So choose them all carefully.

Donkey and penguin draw in the colourinb book style

by BATHI via 99designs by Vista.

Know when to colour outside the lines

As we said above, there are no concrete rules for choosing your branding colours. Treat this article more as a rough guideline or an educational resource to help you make informed decisions about your small business. But above all, don’t neglect your instincts. The main consideration of colours is their emotional connection, so don’t neglect your own feelings when deciding your brand colours.

Check out this article for more branding tips.

Author: Matt Ellis