How to Choose Brand Colors | Customer Impact

Many companies choose their brand colors at the moment the website is being built. The designer asks for a preferred color, you name something, and that is how the palette rolls out into the world. The problem: you have then chosen a website palette, not a brand palette. A brand lives on far more carriers than a homepage. Your signage, your invoices, your work clothing, your trade show booth, your email signature and your social channels all call for the same colors, and different rules apply there than on a screen. In this article you get a step-by-step to choose brand colors that carry your whole brand, not just your landing page.

The difference between a brand palette and a website palette

A website palette is optimized for one context: a backlit screen, with enough accent colors to distinguish buttons, links and notifications. A brand palette has to work more broadly. It has to stay recognizable on an embroidered polo, be readable on a printed flyer, and hold up next to a partner’s visual identity on a shared banner. Colors that look fresh on a screen can turn dull or dirty on paper. A bright digital color that you try to print in CMYK sometimes falls apart entirely.

That is why you do not start at the screen, but at your brand. Your colors are an expression of your positioning and your brand personality, exactly as your tone, your visual language and your form language are. If you want to know what that strategic foundation looks like, first understand what brand strategy is. It describes the positioning, the target audience and the brand promise that steer your color choice. This article picks up where that stops: how you translate that strategy into a working palette.

Step 1: start from your positioning, not from taste

The first question is not “which color do I like”, but “what does my brand want to convey, and to whom”. A law firm that wants to convey reliability and authority chooses different colors than a playful start-up that wants to show accessibility and energy. Color carries meaning, but that meaning is not absolute. The same color can inspire trust in one sector and look cheap in another.

So first write down which associations you want to evoke, in plain words. Three to five adjectives is enough: for example down-to-earth, skilled and warm. Those words come straight out of your brand personality and your positioning. Only once that direction is clear do you start looking at colors. This is how you avoid the most common mistake: choosing a palette based on what the founder finds nice, or what happens to be trending on design platforms. Taste changes, your positioning should do so far more slowly.

Step 2: choose one or two primary colors

Your primary colors are the colors people associate with your brand. Think of the colors your brand is known for without your logo being visible. Keep this small. One dominant color, possibly supplemented by a second, is almost always enough. The fewer primary colors, the stronger the recognition. Brands that stand out everywhere often have a single color that they almost own in their market.

When making that choice, watch out for distinction right away. Look at your direct competitors: if everyone in your sector uses the same shade of blue, you disappear into the crowd by joining in. A deviating primary color is a cheap way to stand out, as long as it fits your positioning. Distinctive power in color is a real lever, not a detail. The same principle applies to your entire identity, as you can read in our guide on developing a brand identity, where color is one of the building blocks alongside form, image and tone.

Step 3: build a functional set of secondary colors

With one or two primary colors you will not get there. You need secondary colors for accents, for backgrounds, and for functional signals. Think of a color for success, one for warning and one for errors in forms and dashboards. On top of that you need a range of neutral shades: a set of grays from near-white to near-black, with which you build text, lines and surfaces. Those neutrals do the most work in practice, because the largest part of every carrier is text on a quiet background.

Keep discipline here too. A secondary palette that expands into ten separate colors becomes unmanageable and undermines your recognizability. Limit yourself to what you really need to cover every situation: your primary colors, a handful of accents, your functional status colors and your neutrals. For each color, record the exact values in every relevant color system: HEX for digital, RGB for screens, CMYK for print and preferably a Pantone reference for consistent production. That way your red stays the same red everywhere, no matter who opens the file.

Step 4: check contrast and accessibility

Nice is not enough, readable is a requirement. Text must have sufficient contrast with its background, otherwise people drop off and you exclude visitors with a visual impairment. Check the combinations you actually use: your text color on your background color, your button text on your button color, your links in body text. Do not rely on your eye for this, but on a contrast check against the common accessibility standards.

Do not forget the practical edge cases either. What does your palette look like in black and white, for example on a faxed or photocopied invoice? Does your primary color stay recognizable if a color next to it drops away? Does your accent color also work for people who distinguish colors with difficulty, or do you lean too heavily on the difference between red and green? A palette that passes these tests is a palette that works everywhere, not just in the showcase.

Step 5: test on every carrier and lock it down

Before you make the palette final, put it on your real carriers. Print a proof of your business card and your flyer, look at your colors on a cheap screen next to an expensive screen, place a mockup on your facade and put a test post on LinkedIn. You then see right away where a color falls apart or turns out too faint. Better to discover that now than after ordering a thousand brochures.

Whatever holds up, you record in a brand guideline. Describe which color is primary, which is secondary, which neutrals you use, with all color values and with rules about when you deploy what. Without that document, your palette will drift within a year, because everyone who designs something picks a slightly different shade. If you do not want to figure this out yourself and want a palette that is strategically sound right away, an experienced branding agency helps you from positioning to a locked-down color system.

Ready to set your brand colors right?

Choosing brand colors is not a last-minute taste exercise, but a strategic choice that makes your whole brand more consistent and more recognizable. Do you want to build your palette together from your positioning, instead of from what happens to look nice on your homepage? Get in touch and we will look together at how to give your brand the same recognizable face everywhere.