In this blog, I’m going to share how you can choose your brand colors strategically.
My name is Gurpreet Singh, I’m an Education Business consultant and brand strategist. Welcome to my blog.
I am so excited that you are here. I’m a little over-caffeinated and just really excited that you’re here, forgive me. Okay, so I have worked
as a brand strategist for a long time. I’ve worked behind the scenes of hundreds of brands and I approach everything from a psychology-first, psychology-driven perspective. We’re gonna talk about how that plays into your color selection here in this blog.
The mindset to keep in mind as you’re choosing colors for your brand is that you wanna build your brand on truth, not trends.
You might personally like specific colors but you have to start with the truth of your brand first to make sure that the outward expression of your brand, colors being a major piece of that, are actually communicating what you want your brand to communicate.
So that said, you always need to start with the inner part of your brand first.
So what are the values or beliefs that you stand for?
What are the emotions that you want to inspire or spark in people when they come into contact with your brand?
There’s going to be wildly different color choices between a brand that wants to excite or maybe even push the edges or rebel, just rock the market versus a brand that wants to make you feel safe and comfortable and accepted and seen.
So decide first what is the overarching theme or personality of your brand. Once you have that idea in mind, the bridge to get to actually
selecting your brand colors is to start looking for other visual inspiration that makes you feel that way.
So if you want people to feel like excited or like it’s a revolution, start looking.
I love Pinterest. It’s my favorite tool ever. So start looking somewhere where you can find visual inspiration.
Pinterest would be my suggestion.
Look for photographs, images, art, or other brands that make you feel that way. Start bringing those all together onto one inspiration board. Chances are after you pin between 30, 40 maybe even up to 50 images on one board, searching from that place of feeling and emotion and psychology.
Again, you’re gonna have to use your intuition here, it’s not going to be something that is cut and dry. But once you have all of those together you’ll start to see trends. You’re gonna start to see patterns. You’re gonna start to see colors that are showing up in
many different of your pins and you can take out the ones that now don’t fit the overall look and feel that you’re creating with
this inspiration board. You can also do this just by looking for a single photograph and this works really well.
If you look at websites like designseeds.com they give you color palettes galore that are all just based on a single image.
So imagine that like caring, safe, comforting brand. You might find an image of a warm wool blanket next to a brick fireplace
with warm hues and candlelight and that type of thing. And you can actually pull a color palette right from that single photograph. Or in the case of the Pinterest board, you can take a screenshot of the entire board once you’re happy with how the overall look and feel is coming.
And you can load that screenshot into a tool that I love called coolors.co. Coolors is amazing because it actually lets you use an eyedropper from all different parts of the image. You can either let it generate the color pallettes automatically or you can move the eyedropper around yourself to choose specific colors. And it gives you the hex code, the RGB and the CYMK, the one that you’re most concerned about if you’re building a brand online , designing a website or putting colors into Canva. That’s what going to let you copy and paste the color into different web applications.
5 Colors strategy
For people who are just getting started, choosing their brand colors, I always recommend that you look for five colors. I’m going to explain what each of the five should be.
One of your colors should be dark neutral. Meaning black or nearly black. This is going to be used for some backgrounds but mostly for things like text colors.
Then on the other end of the spectrum, you’re going to choose a white or nearly white color. This is going to be used for text colors on dark backgrounds and
then it’s often used as a background color itself. Whenever you want to create breathing room or white space in a design.
And then for the three colors in the middle of your palette,
The first one is going to be your primary brand color. This is the one that you want people to associate with you so you’re going to use it most often.
You’re going to want an accent color as well. That’s often in the same color family so like on the same side of the color wheel as your primary brand color. But it doesn’t have to be depending on the effect that you’re trying to create.
But what’s most important is that you have one very contrasty color. So a color that stands out from the rest of the palette so that you can use it online for things like buttons or links. Things that you want to draw the eye’s attention to.
So as you’re playing around with either the automatically generated color pallettes in coolors.co or you’re choosing them yourself, make sure that you’re looking for those 5 different colors.
That’ll make sure that the brand colors you select are actually usable when you start to design your website, to create graphics in Canva, whatever you’re doing with your brand colors.
And before we go, one side note, as I explained when we got started, I’m the psychology-driven brand strategist. And we haven’t talked about color psychology yet.
The reason why I like to start with images and whole like collections of images to choose colors as opposed to color psychology is that color psychology can vary a lot. So for example, green tends to be the color of growth. That works if you’re teaching people how to grow, perhaps in an organic, natural way, green might be a really great color for your brand. But chances are you’ve already realized that when you started to pan images of outdoor scenes or like a bud coming out of the soil. Things that make you feel like the feeling that you started to look for when you started gathering inspiration on the Pinterest form.
And the reason I don’t always rely on color psychology is that it can vary. So blue tends to be the color of being trustworthy
or community-driven.
But let’s imagine like a very deep dark navy blue. That starts to feel more royal, more formal, more stoic. And then contrast that with a bright saturated teal. That one feels energetic and playful. So even though both of those colors are blue they can illicit different psychological reactions from us because we’re used to seeing the different shades and hues of blue in different contexts.
Our brain is so symbolic. The subconscious mind operates and understands things based on symbols.
So the way to shortcut this without having to learn all of the color psychology of all of the different colors is to use that technique that I told you about early in the video which is finding images that portray that feeling, that emotion, that you want to convey in your brand.
If you’d like an even more detailed training around selecting colors for your brand with step-by-step and lots of examples plus everything else that it takes to build a psychology-driven brand from choosing your position and strategy and personality in the market to fonts, colors, naming it, taglines and everything in between, leave me a comment below.
I would love to see the color palette that you end up with or be happy to answer any questions that you have about this process. I hope you’re having an incredible day, I will see you in the next blog.
