How to Pick the Right Colour Palette for Your Brand

Those who are familiar with designing and printing marketing tools such as business cards, brochures and other direct mails know the value of a good colour palette for a brand. The colour scheme not only represents your brand but can also contribute to the success or failure of your business. That’s why it is important to pick the right colour palette to create a relevant, memorable and persuasive brand. Here’s a quick guide from our digital printing experts, with several years of experience in dealing with colours, to help you select a suitable colour scheme.

A Guide to Choosing the Perfect Colour Palette for Your Brand

Know What You Want

You should know your focus and how you want your audience to perceive your brand identity before selecting the colour palette. Whether you want to encourage your customers to be bold and act quickly or you want to demonstrate a timeless, mature and serious approach, determining the type of message to be conveyed through brand colours should be decided in advance. Determining the brand’s mood to be displayed through colours will filter the search for the right colour scheme.

Understand the Colour Psychology

Understanding the colour psychology will help you reflect the feelings you want to evoke from your customers because every colour signifies a different emotion. For example, red is considered as energetic, youthful and loud whereas blue cultivates a trustworthy and professional image. If you choose the colour that doesn’t convey the right emotions, you’ll fail to attract your target market. Take a look at this list of colours and what they symbolize.

Choose More than One Colour

It is not necessary to choose a single colour for your brand. You can go up to four colours depending on your type of marketing. Generally, three colours are used as base, accent and neutral to create a powerful colour palette. This is equally applicable to monochrome schemes as it might require some variation in hues for different purposes.

Out of the three colours to choose, your base colour is crucial as it should reflect your brand personality’s most dominant trait. Choose the remaining colours that complement your base colour. As far as the accent colour is concerned, aside from matching your brand’s personality, it should also pair visually with the base colour because it will be colour you use the most after the base colour. Lastly, the neutral colour is likely a background colour. Typically, different hues of gray, beige, white and off-white are used. Some companies also prefer black as an accent colour but it should be used with care as it can dominate the colour scheme.

Analyze Your Competition

Researching what your competitors are doing is an important part of creating a marketing strategy. Make sure you analyze the logos, website and colour schemes of other brands in the industry to decide whether you want to compete or try something different to create a unique brand identity.

Feel Free to Experiment

There is no specific formula for building a brand colour scheme. It is a creative thing so you’re free to experiment and choose hues that make your brand stand out. Even if you’ve selected the three options to create a powerful palette, you can try out new ways to portray your brand while designing website, logos, business cards, brochures, catalogues and at other promotional platforms using their shade (black + pure colour), tone (gray + pure colour) and tint (white + pure colour).

Your brand colour palette is an essential part of your marketing as your existing and potential customers will consider it as a reflection of your products and services. Make sure the colours you choose establish an emotional connection, match your brand’s personality traits and convey the exact message you want the customers to perceive. To know more, get in touch with an experienced designer and a well-known printing solution provider in Toronto to understand colours and then make an informed decision.