Picking Your Brand Colours

Picking your brand colours can be quite difficult, especially for those of us who may not have an eye for design or any knowledge about colour theory.

We have written this blog to help you with some basic colour theory, along with some tips and tricks in how to use the online free tool ‘Coolors’ to help you complete the challenge!

Understanding the symbolic meaning of colours is a great start to choosing your brand colours and ensuring that they reflect your brands identity and values. Here are a few examples of colour meanings and what they are commonly associated with.

Red

The colour red evokes strong emotion and passion. Red is also a colour that has been proven to stimulate hunger, along with yellow and orange. These combinations are commonly used by fast food restaurants (McDonalds and Hungry Jacks as an example) as colour theory argues that this combination can make people passionately hungry.

Blue

Studies have shown that blue is the most productive colour and is often used in offices and schools to encourage productivity and stimulate the mind. Blue is also historically associated with calmness or serenity, and in juxtaposition of red, also curbs appetite. Blue would be a great colour for a company that wants to either encourage productivity, such as an accounting firm or calmness and serenity, such as a yoga studio. Studies have also shown that blue is commonly used in medical branding as it feels quite clean and fresh.

Green

Green stimulates health and wealth and is commonly associated with nature. Green can make you feel fresh, safe, optimistic, and tranquil, often being used by medical facilities such as St John Ambulance services in WA. Alternatively, green can psychologically be associated with jealousy or envy.

Orange

Orange is a colour used for creativity and enthusiasm and is associated with youth. As a secondary colour, orange is used to attract attention, such as hi-visibility vests without being as aggressive as red. Orange is a youthful and fun colour and a great choice for child-friendly businesses. An example of a company who uses orange to market to a younger audience base is Nickelodeon.

Yellow

Yellow is another youthful colour and can be used to represent happiness, optimism, enlightenment, and positivity. Being stimulating to both a child’s mind, and their creativity, yellow is another great option for child-focused companies. Research has shown that the human eye processes yellow first and in doing so, yellow is also used to show caution such as ‘Slow Down’ street signs and ‘toxic hazard’ safety signs.

Now to the fun stuff…. Playing with the colours!

A great tool to explore colour combinations and see how they work is Coolors. Coolors is a free, online tool and is the website Liz currently uses to build colour palettes for our clients. It is a great website that really encourages you to play around with colour combinations. Here are 5 great ways to use Coolors to build your colour palette:

Colour exploring

Coolors searching options are great, especially if you are completely unsure about what colours to choose. Starting on the explore page, Coolors has a drop-down tab next to the search bar where you can choose from trending, latest or popular. Trending will give you the colour combinations that are currently popular right now, popular will give you colour palettes that are popular across the website overall and latest will show you the newest colour palette combinations on the website.

Search options

Although Coloors encourages you to randomly generate a palette when you enter the colour generator, alternatively you can search specific colours if you have a certain colour in mind. On the explore page you can use the search bar to enter colours, such as green and yellow, and then Coolors will show you palettes that include those colours. If you see a colour that you like, but do not like the palette it is in then you can click on it and copy that specific shade.

Alternatively, if you wanted to generate a specific colour-style, such as monochromatic, or complementary than this option is also integrated in Coolors. If you select generate at the top of the home page, and then click the ‘…’ more option above your colour palette you then are able to select a colour generator method.

Change colour order

When you are in the Generator, Coolors makes it very easy to change the order of your selected colours by selecting ‘drag’, which will show you how each colour interacts with one and other.

Easily editable

Editing your colour palette is extremely easy in Coolors. Randomly generating palettes or searching specific colours, once you have a colour palette you can easily delete, rearrange, add and favourite specific colours as well as edit the shades of each colour in your palette. If you are happy with the colour harmony but find one colour to be a little too dark or light, then you can click on that image and select ‘view shades’. When this tab opens, you see that colour in different shades, that are adjusted by adding white or black which doesn’t change the undertones of your colour. Alternatively, if you are not happy with a colour, or want a smaller selection of colours you can easily remove a colour from your palette by deleting it.

Exportable

Once you are happy with your colour palette you are able to export in multiple formats, the most popular being as a PDF, image or code. Exporting as an image will give you the colour swatches along with their HEX code. Exporting as a PDF will give you much more detail and will include the colours along with their colour codes in HEX, RGB, HSB and CMYK. This makes digital design very easy, as you can integrate your exact chosen colour into design tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Canva.

Coolors is a great online tool that is FREE! We love using Coolors here at BOSS to explore client’s ideas and visions for their business. We hope these tips and tricks can help you better understand the basics of colour theory, and that you have as much fun playing around and exploring colour palettes as we do.