The Psychology of Color and Why It Matters for Your Company’s Logo

3 min readMar 19, 2018

The next time you decide you want to add additional colors to your logo design, keep in mind that 95% of the top brand logos only use one, or at most, two colors in their brandmark. One color logos portray the confidence of an established company and have a very professional look.

These much simpler logos are used by big brands because they know, through years of marketing research and testing that smaller companies could not afford, that consumers tend to pick one product over another because it is on their minds, and logos which have too much information to process, including multiple colors, are harder for people to remember.

Color Matters

According to some interesting color statistics of top big brand logos:

95% — Use one or two colors
33% — Use color blue
29% — Use color red
28% — Use black or gray-scale colors
13% — Use yellow or gold colors
05% — Use more than two colors

Nearly 85% of consumers name color as the primary reason that they purchase a particular product.

As you can see from those stats, the majority of brands are using either blue or red in their logos, with black being not too far behind them. Red tends to convey desire, passion, and power. Blue conveys professionalism and faith. So do we start messing with that psychology of color when we throw multiple colors into the mix? Given the amount of research big brands have done on the subject matter, I am going to say, probably, yes.

While big brands tend to stick with logos that are one or two colors, so many amateur logo designers will try to throw too many color into the mix. This can lead to a sub-par logo for a company. Sadly, when price is the determining factor for choosing a logo designer, rather than the quality of their body of work, your business image can suffer the consequences.

A good graphic designer should be able to create a memorable logo without having to resort to the use of multiple colors that boggle the mind, or trendy color combinations that will soon become outdated.

Here are examples of some big brands that have simple, one color, logos. I bet you will have no problem recognizing them, even when a company name isn’t attached! Also take note of how many use simply black in their logos.