Colour and your brand
Humans are highly receptive to colour. Whether looking at the natural world, engaging with culture or interacting with our environment, we connect with colour and attribute meaning to it on a conscious and subconscious level. Considering visual design within the context of your brand, colour can play a key role in influencing perceptions. Harnessing colour psychology effectively enhances visual design and can bring further resonance to your overall brand.
Once you’ve defined your core values and have a clear and agreed understanding of purpose, you should have a good understanding of how you’d like to position your brand, what you’d like to say and how you’d like to say it. Understanding your tone of voice will go a long way in helping select the correct palette to communicate your brand with strength and clarity.
Which colours mean what?
Identifying key brand personality traits is essential in finding the most successful logo colour for your company. Whether you want to be bold and assertive or more sophisticated, thinking about colour psychology and colour meanings is an excellent place to start. Research shows us that blue typically suggests trustworthiness and maturity, whilst red typically reinforces playful, youthful and modern qualities.
- Red — Excitement, passion, energy, danger. Warmth makes red a dependable option for a modern, playful or youthful business that wants to be seen
- Orange — Invigorating, youthful, often seen as the colour of innovation and modern thinking. Typically orange is a colour associated with being approachable
- Yellow — Sunny, warm, positive, youthful and friendly
- Green — Versatile. Popular with financial products, green is often associated with growth and freshness
- Blue — Emphasises maturity and professionalism. A serious colour that reinforces trust. One of the most widely used colours in corporate logos
- Purple — Historically a colour of wealth, more recently purple’s associations can also be attributed to cutting edge, luxury and femininity
- Brown — Masculine connotations and often used for products associated with rural life and the outdoors
- Black — Sophisticated, slick, modern and luxurious
- White — Youthful, economical, signifies purity, cleanliness and simplicity. In practical terms, it makes a great secondary accent colour against a coloured or dark background.
How many colours?
No hard and fast rule here. A varied and wide range of colours might typically make for a more playful look and feel. A more tonal and paired back palette could create a feeling of sophistication. Use of tonal greys with a bright accent colour can be highly effective in helping with hierarchy and clarity in brand messaging.
Multiple colours are a great way to show a diversity of services offered. Consideration of colours against one another within a palette is key to arranging a palette that is cohesive and unique. Adobe Kuler is a great resource for exploring colour harmonies.
Use colour to stand out
Consideration of your palette with relation to competitors can offer a great way to differentiate and deliver messaging in a crowded market place. With an understanding of some of the most common psychological colour associations outlined above, informed decisions can be made to help help engage audiences.
Communicating the core of your business and what it stands for is key. Colour can go a long way to helping you do that.
