How to Choose the Perfect Brand Colors: A Complete Guide

Which is the best colour for your brand? More importantly, how do you choose which colour you should have in your brand? Even bigger question. How do you work out secondary and tertiary and other colours that you need for an effective brand identity and logo? In this guide, I'm going to show you exactly how you can come up with the right colour for your brand and some interesting facts that you need to know that you probably don't know already.

Step 1: Selecting Your Primary Color

The first step in creating a good brand colour is selecting the primary colour. This is also known as a dominant colour or the main brand colour. For me, it's this orange. We chose this because it speaks to our creativity and also the youthful nature of our company.

Now, there are many ways to come up with a primary or dominant colour. But one of my favorite ways is to get a mood board and the mood board will have products, have competitors and it'll have a vibe of a mood, and within that mood you'll find loads of colours inside of there that you could take inspiration from.

For instance, if Apple would put a mood board together. Obviously, they'll be diverse. But the main mood will be sharp and elegant which is the black colour that they use. If you take HelloFresh and see what they would put in a mood board or see what products they sell, see what they do. They're gonna go for green as their dominant colour. These things aren't by accident. These are intentional choices that are made by designers and companies to determine what the colour will be.

Method 2: Analyzing Your Competition

The second way is to look at the competition. You can see what your competitors are doing, or what the brand's competitors are doing. And maybe, refine it. Or choose an opposite colour to stand for something different. By standing for something different, it may be a bit complicated at first to explain, but I'll try it right now.

The Psychology Behind Color Choices

There is psychology in colour. It's called colour psychology. Different colours have different meanings for the brands that you see.

For instance, Coca-Cola. They've got a very pungent Red. Not pungent. I can't say pungent. It's not a smell, is it? They've got a very bright red, and that red has been a standard of Coca-Cola ever since its inception. And in colour psychology red stands for passion, excitement and anger. So you've got lots of extreme emotions within that colour.

If you look at Apple and they choose a black colour. Black in its colour psychology needs to be techy, well-respected grounded, sophisticated, powerful, edgy.

HelloFresh, green. It evokes nature, organic, prosperity, and growth.

If you look at Barclays Bank, they've got light blue. So you got an innocent feeling but also trustworthy and openness and do you know why they chose that colour? Because they want you to trust them. They are bank, which is strange. They want to feel open to you.

So the colour choices that have been put in there are directly linked to psychology. So for your company, if you're branding for a client or yourself. Think about the colour psychology. Down Below in the description I'm gonna put all the colour psychologys in there for you. So you can best choose.

The Power of Color: A Brand Experiment

Now, let's do a little experiment. What if we were to change the colours of these brands? These famous brands I have talked about and see what they feel like.

If I was to change HelloFresh to purple, then It's going to be slightly strange. It seems more like a royal brand. That looks a bit weird. Not very good.

Let's change Apple from black to pink. Obviously, this isn't a huge one or a huge difference, because Apple does change their colours from time to time with their products. But it doesn't really make sense. It doesn't have that sophisticated look that it used to have.

Let's change the coke logo to a grey. Boring. It looks neutral. It doesn't look passionate anymore. It's lost its edge.

Colour has a lot to do with your psychology and the way that you present a brand and the colours is really important.

Step 2: Creating Your Secondary Color

Next is the secondary colour. When we have a primary colour. It could be a bit daunting to work out what the secondary colour could be. I mean, a lot of people would just pick one colour and that's it.

Well, here's one really easy way to come up with a complimentary colour on the fly without having to do any work aside from a little bit of math. Double click on the colour. And if it's got a Hue value of over 180. You can tell cause it says over 180 on the H, then minus it by 180. If it's already below 180, add 180 to that number and what you'll see is a complementary colour straightaway.

Quick maths. That gives you the opposite end of the colour wheel, which is the complementary colour and it's super simple to do. You still need to play with the tone and the brightness and saturation slightly. But the Hue will be bang on where it needs to be to be a complementary colour.

Ensuring Proper Contrast

So the next thing you need to do once you have a complementary colour is make sure the contrast is correct. Too many times you see designs that you can't actually read any information from. And graphic design is all about reading information and been able to take it in easily.

What we need to do is check the contrast. That is the brightness value and the easily readable value between certain aspects within the design. There's a few ways of doing this.

Number one. What you can do is take both of the colour combinations and turn it Greyscale. What this will do is it will give you a black and white value to how contrasting it is. If the colour is less contrasting, you won't see much of a difference in both of the primary and the secondary colours. If it is well contrasted. Then you can see that there is a darker version and a lighter version of the gray, which shows good contrast.

The second way is to go to a colour contrast checker website. Where you can add the values by HEX code into the website and it will determine for you whether the contrast works.

It is super important to have good contrast between the colours. Not just for your eyesight and your benefit, but for those who need accessible benefit, so for accessibility. Those who have colour blindness need to be able to read the same information as you do. So checking these colours on the website is a easy way of determining whether your colour is generally gonna work or not.

Step 3: Adding Neutral Colors

Now, step 3. We're going to be looking at neutral colours. So, any brand that you see, they all have a neutral colour as their main copy colour. That means it's the one that's most functional. It's one that you read all the information from.

For Coca-Cola, it's white or black. And interestingly enough most companies use white or black as they a neutral colour, because it's not meant to stand out hugely. It's meant to be a functional aspect. It's meant to allow you to read what they're saying rather than to get the brand across.

You could call this a tertiary colour scheme, but I generally stick towards a neutral side, because you're not really going to be adding crazy colours in there. I mean, you can always add them in. If depending on your business, you can break the rules. But generally speaking, we're going to be adding colours are easy to read. So blacks, whites, dark blues, and not accented colours.

Breaking the Rules

Colour isn't as subjective as you may think. There are rules, but again, rules are made to be broken. So, what I'm telling you all these associations with colours and how to use them, where to get them from, these rules can most definitely be broken. Don't get me wrong.

Conclusion

That's how you come up with a colour combination for your logo and brand identity. It can kind of seem a bit daunting at first, but as you can tell there are so many tools online and things that you can learn about colours to get the best out of it. You can see that our brand colour is behind me. This is what we've done. We've changed. This is the new set.