Color palette exploration is one of our favorite tasks when building out a client’s brand identity. Color plays an important role in brand recognizability and has the ability to create an immediate and memorable connection with the brands’ ideal audience.

Psychological associations of color—

• Red: fire, warning, violence, excitement, love, power, passion.

• Orange: energetic, health, vitality, friendly, confidence.

• Yellow: optimistic, fun, energetic, happiness, cheerful, hopeful.

• Green: earthy, growth, renewal, peace, health, envy, jealousy.

• Blue: reliability, trust, calm, serenity, strength, responsibility.

• Purple: wise, wealthy, creative, imaginative, royal.

Our process—

Step 1: gather color inspiration. We begin to establish this early on in the brand discovery process. For example, a client may say their brand is “trustworthy” or “sustainable”. These two keywords evoke a certain color response — dark blues (trustworthy) or neutrals/greens (sustainable). Here are two examples - one for a coastal financial firm, and another for a salad-based cafe:

We also look at logos of brands in a similar space to our client’s niche, searching for commonalities. For example, many financial logos use blue or navy, colors that illicit trust (the cornerstone of a client’s relationship with a financial specialist). Creating a palette for a financial firm that consists of bright oranges and yellows doesn’t represent the values that our client’s target audience may align with unless they’re specifically trying to stand out/disrupt the niche they’re in. Once we have a foundation to build from, we begin creating palette options.

Step 2: pull 4-6 Pantone Coated colors into Adobe Illustrator after referencing the physical Coated Color Bridge Guide Book. When selecting colors, contrast is key as you want to make sure you have a nice balance of light and dark tones. From there, we hone in on 2-3 primary colors. Typically, these are the colors we’ll provide the client’s logos in (but each brand’s final identity is different). It’s important to determine which colors in the palette will be used most often and which colors will fall back as accents. Accents are useful for web design —think buttons or banners, icon, or illustration creation.

These 2-3 accent colors become secondary. Our secondary palettes typically include a light neutral to round out the palette and provide contrast.

Step 3: run color options by the client. We typically create a presentation that includes all of the logos in their final identity so they can visualize how the colors will interact.

You can see how these palettes emulate the wood, metal, and neutral tones of Redfern’s development projects in these photos of their properties. Tying colors directly to the brand creates recognition, trust, and legitimacy in branding.

As always, if you have questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. Abby, our Senior Designer, is a pro at Pantone books, Pantone’s website, when to use CMYK vs. RGB files for print vs. digital spaces, how to export logo files, and lots more!

Here are some additional resources we often refer to:

• Medium - A History of Color

• Smashing Magazine - Color Theory for Designers, Part 1

• Smashing Magazine - Color Theory for Designers, Part 2

• Smashing Magazine - Color Theory for Designers, Part 3

• Made by Chroma - Picking the Perfect Palette

• Web Ascender - Understanding Color Schemes

• Sensational Color - Hue vs Value vs Chroma

• Elle & Co. Design - Color Palette

• Lumi - Coated vs. Uncoated Pantone