The Label: Creating an emotional connection through color

Product Designer, Anna Shapovaliuk, explores the emotive role color plays in Zalando’s new visual language.

Colour is a powerful instrument for branding. It can help a brand set itself apart from competitors, inspire emotional responses, and leave a lasting impression on customers. Colour can become a brand’s signature, and its absence can make you fade into the background.

In the fall of 2020, we launched a new visual language — The Label — in 18 markets. In order to achieve a look that would be distinctive and recognisable, we redesigned key stylistic elements including our layouts, typography, iconography, and colours.

Zalando’s original colour palette was minimal: greys, black and orange accents on a lot of white space. We relied heavily on photography because we had the idea of being a neutral platform for other brands — of being the store window. Our brand took (too much of) a backseat to our content.

Our new visual language still provides a stage for our partner brands but uses colour to create an emotional connection with our customers and highlight key moments, such as a new campaign, exclusive collection or special cause. Our palette is now a scalable system that illustrates the brand’s inclusive, bold and friendly personality.

Colour psychology

We produced tons of mockups and layouts while experimenting with how colours could work in our digital experience. We explored different ways to distinguish ourselves from other companies, trying out punchy colours, pastels, monochromes, and gradients. It was clear that colour could be used as a vehicle for our brand’s personality, but first we needed to understand how certain colour associations or combinations elicited (positive and negative) emotions — so we turned to colour psychology.

Two key learnings helped us in our decision-making process.

Firstly, context is everything and no one experiences colour in the same way. A global research study investigating the psychology of colour showed that people’s interpretation of colour depends greatly on context and perception. Responses to colour relate to spatial, cultural and physiological factors. The colour red, for example, can indicate a warning or alert you to a sale where you can pick up a good deal.

Secondly, colour preference can be predicted by a colour’s attributes: warm or cool, clean or dirty, bright or muted. Brands that use darker, muted palettes are perceived as premium, and brighter palettes as young and dynamic.

With these learnings in mind we ran a benchmark against 24 brands operating in the digital fashion and beauty sectors. We assessed whether their primary palettes consisted of colours that were soft, calm and quiet, or loud, punchy and vibrant in relation to the segment they operate in — democratic or premium. Zalando’s colour usage placed us in a crowded area as our colour scheme was similar to several other brands.

We decided to look for opportunities to make our brand stand out and achieve the character we were striving for. We opted to explore more vibrant colour palettes so that we’d be perceived as a dynamic, democratic brand, serving a diverse range of customers.

Early explorations

We considered dialing up and amplifying our existing palette, adding analogous colours — colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel — into the mix. We experimented with colour combinations and the idea of using more primary colours. Our research showed that by introducing more colours, we would enter an area with less competition. We also considered using a fixed palette so that we could teach associations, for example, sustainability campaigns could always have a hint of dedicated colour.

We landed, however, on a solution that we referred to internally as Colour Snap.

Zalando is photography heavy, so we decided to complement this content using colour. We developed an algorithm that automatically pulled the brightest and most dominant colour from a featured photograph and paired it with the shade it was closest to in an extensive, predefined colour palette. This concept allowed us to have a broad yet controlled palette within one colour family.

Our primary colour set

Though our algorithm has evolved since then, we chose our very first set of colours based on another analysis. Revisiting our benchmark, we listed the dominant colours used in our competitors’ digital products to find the most popular shades and tonalities. After comparing commonly used colour schemes, we hand-picked a colour palette that was unique to Zalando and set the tone for our Colour Snap tool.

Challenges and scaling

We noticed a few challenges with the first version of our algorithm. Going by the amount of pixels in a certain colour, the algorithm often took the models’ skin tones to be the dominant colour of an image instead of items of clothing as planned. We refined the algorithm to resolve this.

Secondly, we wanted to match colour and image more accurately. We realised that our predefined fixed palette had limitations, and some colours were appearing more often than others which made the shopping experience feel repetitive.

We solved this by abandoning the fixed palette completely. The algorithm now finds the picture’s most prominent colour and adjusts its attributes — hue, saturation and luminosity — to match the tonality and mood that we set for our brand character during the benchmarking and research stages.

This way the automatic colour match is more accurate and no two banners have the same colour but they are part of one colour family. Our colour language has variety, but is still harmonious.

With the new colours and scalable solution we can now truly celebrate the diversity of our content, highlighting accent colours and bringing more attention to campaigns. Our partners’ content, such as campaign photography, receive the same treatment and so they’re also incorporated smoothly into the platform.

Our new Colour Snap tool, and the defined colour range which we use to celebrate photography, nicely compliments our overall Colour System, which remains in neutral tones of black and white. Our brand colour is still the Zalando Orange, and its vibrance nicely matches that of our overall colour family.

We moved from a basic colour palette to a scalable system and our algorithms are now a creative instrument available to other teams to apply to different parts of the experience.