One of my most frequent queries is about creating a balanced colour palette. And it’s not hard to see why. Most business owners know that colour is important in their branding – even when they aren’t sure exactly why.
And they’re right – colour choice is vital for your brand in many ways.
A brand’s colour palette is more than just visual – it’s elemental. It’s a spiritual reflection of the values, personality and feelings a brand wishes to show. As ancient cultures assigned energy and meaning to the elements of earth, wind, fire and water, the modern brand uses colours to evoke emotion and communicate purpose.
And like the elements, a brand palette in flux can create chaos.
It’s not just about choosing what looks good, but achieving a delicate balance. This balance achieves both visual harmony and a psychological purpose in the brand. A fully balanced palette creates a role for every colour choice – every hue has a voice and a reason.
This article is your guide to harnessing the elements – crafting a balanced colour palette that reflects your brand. Colour theory, design strategy, and human understanding are all components of creating a balanced palette.
Understanding Colour Theory in a Balanced Colour Palette
Creating a colour palette is fun but can also be frustrating. This frustration usually comes from not knowing the basics and diving right in. Before attempting to find the exact hue of turquoise that reflects your brand, it’s worth understanding the science behind colour.
The colour wheel is our basic compass here, providing direction and bearings.
Basics of Colour Theory
Understanding the basics is vital to creating a balanced brand colour palette. Here are some terms and basics to understand.
Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Colours
- Primary colours – Red, yellow and blue. The fundamental colours can’t be created by mixing other colours. They are the basis for mixing the other colours.
- Secondary colours – Orange, green and purple. These are mixed from red and yellow, yellow and blue and blue and red, respectively. The purest secondary colours are created from an even mix of their component primary colours.
- Tertiary colours – More varied hues made by mixing a primary colour with an adjacent secondary colour.
Colour Wheel and Relationships
- Complementary – These are opposite on the colour wheel (e.g. blue and orange) and are used primarily to create contrast.
- Analogous – These are side-by-side on the colour wheel (e.g. blue, teal and green) and create harmony
- Triadic – These are groupings of three evenly spaced hues (e.g. blue, red and yellow) to create dynamic balance.
(The above is a quick breakdown of the basics of colour theory. There is a lot of jargon involved in this area, so I also have a quick guide for what some of these terms mean here.)
Psychological Impact of Colours
One of the biggest reasons that colour is vital for a brand is that it is felt before it is understood. Colour has a deep, psychological impact because it triggers instinctive and learned associations. These influence behaviour, emotions and sometimes even physical responses.
Brands can use these influences to impact an audience, taking them on an emotional journey to better connect with them. Every hue triggers a different emotional response, leaving the audience with a feeling to associate with the brand. Red excites, blue calms, and yellow energises. These associations are instinctual and elemental, silently shaping perception before your audience sees your message.
Some examples of the psychological impact of colours are:
- Red – Passion, hunger, urgency
- Blue – Reliability, trust, calm
- Purple – Regal, spiritual, creative
- Black – Sophisticated, powerful, mysterious
You can use colour more effectively if you know how it resonates with different emotions. Selecting hues that align with your brand identity helps create a cohesive experience and boosts your profile.
The Elements of a Balanced Colour Palette
Creating a balanced colour palette for your brand is a journey in itself. It’s not as simple as throwing darts at a colour wheel and hoping for a good result. It requires thought, patience and experimentation. The best way to begin is with a dominant colour.
Choosing a Dominant Colour
The dominant colour of your palette is its anchor. It should reflect your brand’s core personality because it will appear most often. Think of Tiffany’s signature robin egg blue or Cadbury’s deep purple. These colours are used prominently in each brand, building trust and recognition. Cadbury’s purple is so recognisable that they removed the other branding from their bars for a campaign!
When choosing a dominant colour, the key question is: what do we want people to feel when they see this? The dominant colour will be front and centre in your branding, so it needs to provide the feelings you want associated with your brand.
Selecting Supporting Colours
A strong, central colour is key to a good brand palette. But it can’t do everything without support. Supporting colours are your harmonisers – they help balance the dominant colour and create a unique appeal. A strong set of supporting colours helps enhance the dominant colour and offers flexibility for design assets.
Using colour wheel relationships is a great way to ensure you select appropriate supporting colours. These relationships help underscore the emotional resonance of the dominant colour. An analogous scheme creates a strong, cohesive feel. Using complementary hues builds a bold contrast.
It’s important to remember that neutrals (white, black, grey and beige) play an important role here. They provide breathing space and structure, allowing your main colours to stand proud. Seriously, ask any designer worth their salt about the importance of ‘white space’. I guarantee you’ll come away illuminated.
Accent Colours
No palette is truly complete without accent colours. These are the flare, the points of interest that grab attention. Used sparingly, accent colours draw attention and highlight areas you want people to see. This makes them particularly effective for CTAs, buttons and icons.
When choosing accent colours, consider how they can stand out but still belong. They are often brighter and bolder than the other colours in your palette, so be careful not to overuse them. They should punctuate, not dominate.
Practical Steps to Create a Balanced Colour Palette
Knowing how colour works and the components of a brand palette are just the first steps. Bringing this all together in a practical way is a skill in itself. You can use many methods to create a unique and balanced colour palette, but here are some that I’ve found work.
Conducting Research
Building a meaningful, unique, balanced palette without context is hard. Research is an important, but often missed, step in brand colour choices.
Not only should you understand colours, but you also need to understand your audience. Deciding colours based on your personal likes and dislikes is no good – your choice must appeal to your customers. Think also about demographics. Bold, saturated colours work well for a youthful market, but won’t have the same effect on an older demographic.
Aim to build your palette to attract your desired audience and evoke strong emotional connections at an early stage. This will help with recognition and sales down the line.
It’s also important to consider your competitors. Your palette should help you stand out. Using the same colours as a competitor won’t help differentiate you. It could even lead to confusion, which is always bad in branding.
Experimenting with Combinations
Once you’ve conducted your research, it’s time to get practical. Experimenting with combinations is the best way to start understanding the relationships between colours. Here are some methods I use.
Moodboarding can be helpful in the early stages of experimentation. Take images, swatches and interesting colours and create a moodboard to reflect the feel you want from your palette. Think about the emotional resonance you wish to create and pull in images that create these feelings. This is meant to be rough, so have fun with different combinations as you experiment.
Using images as direct inspiration also works. Images of nature work well for this, as nature has an inherent balance we find aesthetically interesting. Taking a single image and picking its key colours is a good way of learning these relationships. If you see an interesting image, save it somewhere and use it to create a scheme. This can be a useful exercise even if you’re not looking for a specific palette, as it teaches you to spot the balance in everyday situations. Below is an example.
Many tools and resources can help you refine a palette, too. Adobe Colours and Coolors have great palette generation tools to give you ideas, but remember to tweak these and add the human element. Otherwise, they can feel generic.
Testing and Iterating
Design is an iterative process by its very nature. As such, your first ideas are not usually going to be perfect. Take time to see how your palette looks across various mediums and situations. Creating mockups is an excellent way to test your palette. See how it would look on websites, social media and physical merchandise. A palette that looks great on your website may look awful on printed material – testing helps you avoid problem areas early. Think carefully about where your brand will be seen and design your palette to work across these touchpoints.
Gather feedback from your key audience. Understanding how they respond to it will help you refine your choices to attract them. Consider accessibility, if it is bold or subtle, childlike or mature. Define how you want your palette perceived, then ask people if they see it that way. Refine it until it is right.
This also brings up an interesting point – intuitive balance is often key. Your intuition should play a role in decisions. It’s a good indicator that you are on the right track if you have strong feelings about a palette. The more you practice creating balanced palettes, the stronger and more accurate your intuition becomes, so learn to trust it.
Avoiding the Pitfalls
The truth is, most palettes work if care is taken in their use. There are some common problems that novices encounter that break this balance.
- Overcomplicated palettes can be confusing, so take a ‘less is more’ approach to your colour scheme. Don’t try to make it do too much.
- Consider contrast and accessibility. Test how easy it is to read – orange text may feel good in theory, but does it make it hard to concentrate on long paragraphs?
- Think about where the brand will be seen. That neon green might be incredible on screens, but probably doesn’t translate to print. Make sure your palette works across ALL touchpoints
- Don’t chase trends, as this leads to a short shelf life for your palette. Instead, build around strong feelings to create a timeless, flexible and functional palette.
Conclusion – What a Balanced Colour Palette does for your Brand
Crafting a balanced colour palette is an exercise in both science and soul. There are strong scientific reasons for colour pairings, but your choice should also feel right. Go beyond picking your favourite tones and look at the relationships between colour and emotions. Aligning your choice to your message and mission creates a powerful asset for your overall brand identity.
A balanced colour palette acts as another storyteller for your brand. It has the power to guide and influence emotions subtly. It creates consistency, clarity and connection – vital elements of a successful brand. It acts as an indicator that reflects who you are and how you change the world.
So start experimenting. Explore, feel and adjust. Harnessing the elements will build a vital part of your brand identity. Do it well and you’ll have a powerful tool to attract attention.
Additional Resources
Tools:
Reading:
- Interaction of Color by Josef Albers
- The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair
Exercises:
- Try applying colour theory to your brand’s social posts.
- Create a palette inspired by a season, a place, or a piece of art.
- Ask: What three words define your brand, and what colours reflect them?
Ready to get the right colours for your brand? Check out what Phoenix can do as you approach your refresh!
