Choosing the Right Color Palette for Your Brand: Tips and Tricks
Color plays an important role in shaping up the perception of a brand. It helps in putting your brand's identity and values across to your target audience and helps you stand out from competitors.
Selecting the right colors / color palette is key in establishing a brand. It is a fine line between taking a brand to heights or can also be a factor in the brand going kaput.
It is important that the color palette you choose ends up making a memorable brand experience that can last generations.
What to consider while choosing palettes?
Brand Understanding
What is the personality of the brand? Is it going to be unorthodox, professional, whacky or playful? It is important that you set your personality straight before going down the path of a potential winning brand palette.
Who Is Your Audience?
Do a research on your target audience, their tastes, current trends that are working, etc. It will help with effective communication and connection with them on a personal level. Take into account age, gender, culture, geography. It is absolutely necessary that your palette is inclusive and does not alienate a particular set of audience or sends across a wrong message across the board.
Research Color Moods
Different colors have different kinds of connections/associations. It is important to have a basic level of understanding colors before deep dive into the world of colors. Choose colors that will help you align with the desired emotions.
Primary And Secondary Colors
Primary Color In order to set the tone for the future of your brand, it is important to pick the right set of primary and secondary colors. Select a color that sings dominance, has a strong pull. It should be impactful enough to represent your brand personality and have a chameleon-like quality to work across mediums. Ensure there is a fine balance in the shade and tone that you have picked. It should be vibrant as and when required and also have an air of subtlety as and when required.
Secondary Color Color that will be used less prominently in comparison to your primary color. They will add interest & value to your branding. You can choose a secondary color that is complementary to your primary color or on the basis of color psychology of other colors available.
Accent Color This is very important in your branding as they can be treated like a topping that adds a pop to your dessert and elevates it. Accent colors can be based on a shade of your primary or secondary color.
Mood Board It helps in visualizing color combinations and can be used as a base for your palette to get potential color combinations going. A mood board can be sourced from anything like websites, magazines, nature, or inspired by other brands that are not direct competitors.
Limited Colors To avoid your branding getting lost in translation, always pick a limited color palette - no more than 3-5 shades and tones. It will enable you to maintain consistency and avoid confusing visuals due to too many colors on them. Remember that limited color palette means more cohesiveness and more attention the branding gets.
Balance Please ensure a balanced palette is chosen that gives your visuals the right amount of interest and eyeballs. Balance and contrast coupled with text readability using contrasting text colors will ensure simplicity, legibility, and clarity to your marketing material.
A/B Testing and Tweaks Before you make your branding identity public, please do soft tests across various mediums like a testing website, social media, and sample print materials. Attention to details towards colors used and how striking the visuals are important. Also, send out the draft branding palette to your friends, colleagues, or sample target audience and get constructive feedback. This will help improve on your branding and ensure you get all the iterations done before going public.
Final Say Always remember that there is room for improvement and constantly updating your palette colors will only help further the visual identity of the brand.