Corporate Branding
One of the most important components of any successful visual identity is the use of color. Color represents a brand’s personality and can impact consumer buying habits. You can learn more about how color communicates through a branch of research known as color psychology. It examines how color influences our behavior, our emotions, our perceptions, and our decision-making.
Red, for instance, tends to evoke strong emotions like passion, love, and excitement. It can also evoke emotions of urgency so it works well in sales. Netflix uses a bright red logo against a black background, giving rise to feelings of anticipation. Restaurants and the food industry use the color red because it encourages appetite. Think Coca-Cola, Frito-Lays, McDonalds, and Wendys. Blue on the other hand, often represents calmness, loyalty, and stability, It creates a sense of security and trust in a brand so it’s popular with security, tech, finance, and health brands. Yellow and green evoke emotions related to nature. Yellow is associated with warmth, sunshine, and joy. It’s a bright color and isn’t seen too often as a main color in a brand identity. Companies that do use yellow as a primary color tend to be iconic for that very reason – National Geographic, Post-it, and the McDonald’s yellow arches. Green is associated with growth, health, vitality, and productivity. It is popular with companies that wish to depict themselves as environmentally friendly and sustainable. Purple is popular with creative brands like Yahoo!, Twitch, Syfy Channel – purple is regal, thoughtful, and a nice middle ground between the intensity of reds and the serenity of blues.
Color also affects us in negative ways as well. Blues can feel somber, evoking feelings of depression. Too much blue in a visual identity and the viewer can start to literally “feel blue.” Too much red and the communication reads as urgent, dangerous, or sometimes even violent. The key to a successful palette is balance and harmony. Black can either portray a sense of mystery and sophistication, or it can be linked to feelings of loneliness, depression, and mourning.
Pair the wrong colors and the image will be off-putting, unlegible, and unappealing. So how do you start to learn what colors work together? The answer is a whole science known as color theory. Color theory is how color works, how colors mix together, all with the end goal of creating color harmony. Here are some standard color schemes to guide you through developing a successful palette.
Complementary colors are those on the opposite sides of the color wheel. Choosing opposite colors, like orange and blue, will create more contrast in your color palette, drawing more attention when paired together. These combinations tend to be bold and bright, which is why sports teams often choose complementary colors. Play around with the balance of the two colors – one warm, one cool, to find the appropriate harmony. A 50/50 balance for instance won’t provide enough contrast in the design.
A monochromatic color palette is one of the easiest palettes to create because it’s made up of the shades, tones, and tints of one hue. Essentially, one color acts as a base and the other colors are produced by either darkening with black (shades), lightening with white (tints), or desaturating with gray (tones). This combination provides a nice composition of light and dark areas which can produce a versatile, harmonious, and conservative aesthetic. It can be difficult to build contrast though, so be mindful how you use the palette.
An analogous color palette includes three colors right next to each other on the color wheel. A harmonious combination of analogous colors, like red+orange+yellow can evoke a feeling of serenity and peace. This combination can be versatile but also overwhelming. Make sure you choose one of the three colors as your primary, another as a support color, and one as an accent color. This will provide enough visual difference so they don’t compete with each other. Done well, and the design can feel calm and controlled.
A triadic color palette is high contrast like a complementary palette and consists of three evenly spaced colors on the wheel. You know you’ve selected the right colors by connecting them with lines – it should create an equilateral triangle. This palette is great for bold, vibrant palettes. A good balance for this palette is a 2:1 ratio – either two warm colors and one cool, or one warm and two cool colors. A triadic color palette can be great for drawing attention or standing out against a more muted background.
A tetradic color palette is made up of four evenly spaced colors on the wheel. Ideally, the combination is two pairs of complementary colors like red/green combined with blue/orange. It’s important to maintain balance with this palette as the aesthetic can begin to feel overwhelming and unbalanced. Resolve this issue by designating one color to be the primary color.
Building a color palette can be tricky and challenging, but luckily there are plenty of tools available to help you. If you have an image that represents your brand, you can upload it to Canva’s Color Palette Generator and it will automatically generate a palette for you, based on colors in the image. Adobe’s Color Generator has features like accessible tools like color blind safe themes to help you design color combinations that are visually accessible to your audience. You can view popular color trends from different industries and even generate palettes and gradients from uploaded images.
