How to Choose The Best Colors for your Brand?
Why do we need to understand which are the best colors for our brand when you are building your business’s assets?
Building a business is always overwhelming. If you are not experienced, you have not study or have someone to guide you then you are literally walking in the dark. So what a new business owner should first think?
Great combination of two colors for a digital marketing agency
I would say that deciding what colors will represent your brand is one of the most important steps that you first need to take. Something as simple as the color you choose to represent your brand can mean a lot. I remember the time I was in the University how fascinated I was when we did our first case study about colors theory! I remember my teacher emphasizing that color is one of the strongest non-verbal forms of communications that brands can use. Color can instantly evoke an emotion and together with shapes and words can help people understand what the brand is about.
Many specialists agrees that is not only the colors that give the meaning of the brand. However, if you want to feel that you have chose the best colors for our brand you should pay attention to what experts say about the meaning of each colour.
RED
Red: grab attention, warmth & love, power, passion, action. Red is not good to be use in health industry as it is considered that raises the blood pressure, but could be greatly use in food industry as makes people hungry.
Green
Green is associated with money, prosperity and growth, vitality and renewal. Healing, tranquility, environmental, fresh. Also, a company “going green,” association with care about environment and connection to nature.
Blue
Blue: blue is generally associated with care, honesty, and sincerity and it communicates stability and trust, noble (Blue Royal) Blue is associated also with electronic (light emitted by most electronic devices) as well as with success and security.
Yellow
Yellow: curiosity, happiness, warmth and joy. Yellow promotes happiness, warmth, sofia and could be considered a great color for universities.
Orange
Orange: Affordable, creative, light-hearted, and youthful. Orange combines the effect of red and yellow, exciting, and may drive appetite.
Pink
Pin: Feminine, innocent, and gentle. Pink is often used to add female appeal, and represents innocence and delicateness.
Purple: Expensive, nobility, regal, sophisticated, and spiritual. Purple is a blend of red and blue, and is viewed to have confidence and warmth, as well as for evoking feelings of urgency and excitement.
Brown: Natural and earthy, rough, and utility. Brown is used to represent construction, and depth.
White: Peace, purity, cleanliness. White shouldn’t be underestimated.
Black: Distinctive, serious, and authority. Black is sophisticated and classic, just like a clean-cut suit.
Looking above, can you understand now how famous brands use colors to evoke particular emotions and experiences? Even without knowing a product, simply by looking at a particular logo can tell a lot about what the company is about!
But what about if you want to combine 2 colors? And you want to make sure that you have chosend the best colors for your brand?
Combination of colors is so important if you want to use two or more colors to represents your brand. But not everyone instinctively knows that orange and blue is a perfect combination. If you can’t trust your own judgement, the best solution is to understand and rely on the basics of color theory to always pick the right colors.
Learn the Color Wheel
This is the basic color wheel and it will guide you in making color choices. Red, blue and yellow are primary colors. When you mix red and yellow, you get orange; mix blue and yellow, you get green; mix red and blue, you get violet. Orange, green and violet are hence called secondary colors.
Tertiary colors like red-violet and blue-violet are derived by mixing a primary color with a secondary color.
All colors have tints and shades. A tint is the variation of that color when mixed with white; a shade is the variation of that color when mixed with black. But generally, when you choose the colors of your logo you don’t need to worry about tints and shades.
According to color theory, harmonious color combinations use any two colors opposite each other on the color wheel, any three colors equally spaced around the color wheel forming a triangle, or any four colors forming a rectangle (actually, two pairs of colors opposite each other). The harmonious color combinations are called color schemes – sometimes the term ‘color harmonies’ is also used. Color schemes remain harmonious regardless of the rotation angle.
In the color wheel, there’s yet another separation that you need to be aware of so that you can understand color schemes better: warm and cool colors. Each has its own purpose to convey emotions.
Warm colors exhibit energy and joy (best for personal messages), while cool colors convey calmness and peace (best for office use). The wheel itself can be divided easily to get an idea of which colors are warm and which ones cool.
Learn how to master the the Basic Color Schemes to choose the best colors for your brand!
Based on the wheel, there are a few basic rules to match colors. And they’re actually pretty simple.
Complementary colors are any two colors opposite each other on the wheel. For example, blue and orange, or red and green. These create a high contrast, so use them when you want something to stand out. Ideally, use one color as background and the other as accents. Alternately, you can use tints and shades here; a lighter tint of blue contrasted against a darker orange, for example.
Split complementary colors use three colors. The scheme takes one color and matches it with the two colors adjacent to its complementary color. For example, blue, yellow-orange and red-orange.
This scheme is ideal for beginners because it is difficult to mess up. That’s because you get contrasting colors, but they aren’t as diametrically opposite as complementary colors, says Tiger Color.
Analogous colors are any three colors next to each other on the wheel. For example, orange, yellow-orange, and yellow.
With analogous colors, it’s best to avoid hues as they can be jarring. Instead, focus on tints of analogous colors. Another tip Color Wheel Pro shares is to avoid combining warm and cool colors in this scheme.
Triadic colors are any three colors that are equally apart on the color wheel. For example, red, yellow and blue.
The Triadic scheme is also high-contrast, but more balanced than complementary colors. The trick here, is to manage the balance, to let one color dominate and accent with the other two.
When choosing colours to represent your brand it is advised to use only until 3 colours. As a rule of the thumb:
- One colour is usually used when the owner want to build the brand more on personal branding
- Two colours is the most used combination. Usually
- Three colours is more rare and you really need a good balance to have a perfect result! This is considered “old school” and it was used by the first companies that put the bases of what we understand nowadays by branding. It was used more in the food industries by companies like McDonald’s; KFC; Burger King
However, it should be noticed that in most of the cases the third colour is white and most of the brands are in the food industry.
There are only a few cases that uses more than 3 colours on their logo. One of the most successful one is Google. However, if you want to build a brand in Kids niche you can easily play with more than 3 colors!
