A Designers Guide to Choosing Brand Colours

Every year Pantone announces a colour of the year. Every year thousands of brands start using it. Every year those brands look exactly like every other brand that followed the trend. Choosing brand colours without a strategy is one of the most common and expensive mistakes small businesses make. Martin Sully -- brand strategist and designer with 20 years of experience -- walks you through the process of getting it right.

LINKS

Episode page: https://www.snapper.studio/episodes/how-to-choose-brand-colours-ep-9

Blog post – How to Choose Brand Colours: https://www.snapper.studio/blog/choosing-brand-colours

Enjoyed this episode? The best next step is a free 30-minute Discovery Call with Martin. No pitch, no pressure -- just a straight conversation about where your brand is and what it needs. Book at https://clients.snapper.studio/discovery

Transcript

This is the hot metal brand podcast. I'm your host. Martin Sully, founder of snapper studio, a brand strategy and visual design studio in the heart of Newcastle, Australia, and I'm on a mission to help you gain clarity in your brand and confidence in what you're selling, from thoughtful, empowering brand strategies to defining powerful visual stories. I'll arm you with bite sized branding tools to help you grow your brand and leave your own unique mark.

We're fast approaching episode 10, and I've scratched the surface of the importance of having a solid strategy. Most conversations I have with business owners begin with them looking at improving their brand, whether it's from a visual aspect, reputation or that the business has changed so much that they feel awkward explaining what the business actually does to somebody else.

The flow typically looks something like this: logo and variations, colour palette and fonts. But here's the kicker, there's like 20,000 other businesses that just did that same thing as you right then. You'll stick to default colours that are kind of in there anyway. You can see it now -- you get that creamy kind of background colour and a slightly darker hue of that cream colour for the dominant brand colour.

So today, this is why I'm focusing on design and choosing your brand colours. I love talking about colours, so I'm currently creating a guide to help people understand colour theory, including choosing the colours and colour psychology and a bit of brand memorability in there as well.

The first step is to identify your direction. What's your brand trying to communicate and to who? You don't want to just go in there and pluck colours out of thin air, whether you're scrolling Instagram or looking on websites or Pinterest or looking for trendy colour palettes.

Pantone's colour of the year -- they'll pick out things like sustainability is a topic, and then they'll pick out like one colour they think represents sustainability. As a result of that, you get a swathe of new companies starting to use that colour, even if it's not a good fit for the brand.

So if you're picking colours from things that you're seeing, there's a good chance that it's coming from a place of personal preference, which is okay, but not what your customers resonate with the most, or what makes you stand out from competitors.

Hypothetically, imagine you've got a brand strategy for a clothes label. You design environmentally friendly, long lasting clothes. Your target market is women who are disgusted by fast fashion. They want to actively participate in saving the planet by owning quality clothes that last longer. Your brand is backed by research. Words you'd use to describe it: bold, radical, unforgiving, fearless.

If it were me picking a colour palette for this brand, I'd first look at what the competitors are doing. This makes sure we aren't going to pick something completely identical. And also helps making a final decision easier. Remember, I want them to stand out, not blend in.

Having done a little bit of research, all the competitors use white, black, greys and sagey greens. So I'd look at the brand personality -- words like fearless and radical really strike a chord -- and I'd lean towards picking a really solid bright yellow, indicating a brighter future, and complementing it with maybe hot pink, or perhaps a slightly toned back version of pink with a hint of yellow. Then complementing that with a really light yellow for background colours, but also a deep, dark ocean greeny blue colour.

If you want to pick a colour palette similar to a competitor, it's all about how it's applied. This changes the mood and feeling dramatically. Say they picked that sagey green as their accent colour and used it 10% of the time. You could reverse this and make it your primary colour, using it 80% of the time.

I'm obviously really passionate about getting this bit right -- outlining the colours, how they're used, where they're used, and in what proportion. Is it an 80/10/10 split?

One thing to note: it's essential that you love the colours too. If you're not loving your marketing content and the colours that you use, you're gonna end up flipping them and breaking the consistency. And you'll lose out on all that squishy brand recognition and undo all the work you put into the strategy.

A consistent colour palette increases brand recognition by up to 80%. Even smaller brands can start owning a colour if they use it consistently. You'll become known on your social media feed.

Last thing -- and this is huge. You need to also be aware of the audience's state of mind and cultural expectations. If you're a yoga studio trying to instil calmness, you probably won't want to introduce really bright, bold, vibrant colours and patterns.

Culturally, you need to consider the impact and the meaning of the colours that you choose. Purple in Japan represents power and wealth, but in Thailand, it's the colour worn by widows.

If you're struggling to pick out colours, work on eliminating the colours first. Getting rid of the reds and pinks and purples, moving away from that, and concentrating on the colours that do seem to fit. Then narrow down from there.

I hope you've really enjoyed today's episode. If you're clear on your strategy, picking your colours will be much simpler.