If you can immediately associate McDonald’s with its classic yellow and red, or Tiffany & Co.’s exact shade of robin’s egg blue, you’ve already experienced the heady impact of color on branding firsthand. But these effective branding color palettes don’t often occur by sheer strokes of luck. Color palette methodology can help you pick the colors that not only look good together, but also support your branding goals.
What is Color Palette Methodology?
Color palette methodology uses the color wheel (a 1666 invention by Isaac Newton), to guide the choosing of colors for a harmonious palette. There are 7 major types of color palette methods, which are most effectively shown using a color wheel due to its visual ability to show the relationships between colors. While rules can always be broken of course, these methods are guiding principles behind colors that will most likely work best together.
How Does it Affect Branding and Design?
Color is a powerful element of branding and design due to its ability to draw emotional reactions from consumers. While some reactions to color are more culturally determined (such as red being associated with luck or aggression, depending on where in the world you are), there are many widely experienced reactions to color that are immediate and intense. It’s no wonder then that color is arguably one of the most powerful tools of branding; consumers’ recognition of a brand was shown to increase by a surprising 80% through the use of color. A whopping 90% of people make up their thoughts about a product based solely on color.
Getting Started
Now that you know that color is a powerful tool in branding and design, let’s talk about the actual process of using it. Here are the steps you need to consider when building branding color palettes.
1. Consider Color Psychology: Start off by considering colors and their effects on your target audience. What are the moods, thoughts, or feelings you want to affect when people first interact with your brand? Maybe yellow is the way to go if optimism and energy are a key part of your branding. Black might be your choice if boldness and confidence are at the forefront of your branding. This crucial consideration will help determine your dominant colors.
Pro Tip: When in doubt, test it out. If you want to double check that your colors are communicating your brand values, you can test them out with a group and check out the reactions they have to the colors you have selected.
2. Start With Color Theory Basics: The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. These are the basic colors that can be combined to create the secondary colors: orange, purple, and green. Tertiary colors combine primary and secondary colors to create a whole new range of colors.
In order to go from here to the complexity of the color wheel, we add white and black to the hue, or the pure color. The tint refers to the hue, combined with white. The tone refers to the hue, combined with white and black. The shade refers to the hue, combined with black.
Pro Tip: There are 2 common color standardization systems in design: CMYK and RGB. CMYK is a subtractive model that assumes you subtract colors to get white, whereas RGB is an additive model that assumes you add colors to get white. CMYK is used for print purposes whereas RGB is used for electronic displays.
3. Choose Your Dominant Colors: You will then select 1 or 2 dominant colors, and make sure to note the exact hex codes, rather than a vague color. These will be at the core of your logos, and most likely the colors that will distinguish your brand from others to give you that unique edge. Be careful to stay away from a wide array of colors that may distract and interfere from clean branding.
Pro Tip: Color doesn’t happen in isolation! Think about the context of your color when selecting your branding color palettes. Color behaves differently depending on the colors and shapes around it. A kelly green behaves differently when placed next to a dark blue, versus when it’s placed next to a lime green.
4. Apply Your Color Palette Method:
Monochromatic: A monochromatic color method uses shades and tints of the same color, which usually results in branding color palettes that is foolproof with regards to clashing. However, the downside is that finding accent colors for CTA buttons and the like can be more difficult.
Analogous: An analogous color method makes use of 1 color and the 2 colors directly next to it. It consists of more colors than the monochromatic palette, but without the variety being overly contrasting. This lends the analogous palette to being a favorite among brands that want a softer branding. Think branding for a baby clothing line, for example.
Complementary: This color method makes use of colors on the opposite sides of the color wheel, with tints of those colors. Because of the contrast between the colors, branding color palettes using this method make a statement. Having 1 or 2 clearly dominant colors would be extra important here to really pull your branding together despite such a contrast.
Split Complementary: Similar to complementary, the split complementary color uses the colors across from each other in the color wheel and the colors adjacent as well. Again, this method provides contrast similar to the complementary method, but having the contrast along with many other colors means that you will have to fiddle around to find just the right cohesive combination.
Triadic: The triadic color method forms a triangle with its colors on the color wheel. This is another way to get great contrast in your color palette, but because you have 3 contrasting colors, it may be smart to play with tints of the same hue to have clear dominant colors.
Square: The colors in this method form a square, which provides contrast, but again makes dominant colors all the more important.
Rectangle: While the rectangle is similar to the square, the square color method provides a little more subtlety, giving the bold colors a little more room to shine.
Putting it Into Practice
With the color methods in mind, you can get started on building the color palette that best underlines the intricacies of your branding. Using 5-10 hues with 1-2 dominant colors differing in shades or tints will be the core of the palette. Make sure the colors all have the same tones, or risk clashing. You can avoid risk of clashing by noting exact hex codes for your carefully chosen colors (rather than a vague blue), leading to harmonious branding color palettes. Equally as important to your palette is documenting the rules around the application of your colors in your brand guidelines. Remember that consistency is key in branding and design–and with color being such a powerful psychological tool, you want to make sure your hard work on color earns all the impact it deserves.