Choosing colours for your business sounds like it should be one of the fun parts. Then you start looking and discover hundreds of shades, colour psychology charts, palette generators and a lot of advice about what you’re supposedly meant to choose.
It doesn’t need to be that complicated.
You need colours that suit your business, work reasonably well together and can actually be used on the things your customers will see.
How Do I Choose the Colours for My Brand?
Start with the business, not a colour chart.
Think about three things.
1. What kind of business are you building?
Who are your customers, what are you selling and how would you like the business to come across?
A children’s clothing brand and an accounting firm probably need very different visual personalities, even if both business owners happen to like blue.
2. What colours do you actually like?
Yes, you’re allowed to choose a colour because you like it.
If you’ve always imagined your business being purple, start with purple. You don’t need to abandon it because an online article tells you that businesses in your industry are supposed to use blue.
You’re going to live with these colours for quite a while, so your own preference absolutely counts.
3. What are similar businesses doing?
Have a look at other businesses in your field.
You’re not looking for something to copy. You’re looking to understand what customers are already used to seeing. You can then decide whether you want your business to feel comfortably familiar within that space or noticeably different from it.
THE GOAL
Find a colour that feels right for the business and gives you something useful to build from.
Start With One Main Colour
You don’t need to choose an entire palette at once.
Start with the colour you would most like people to associate with your business.
Once you have that, finding the rest becomes much easier because you’re no longer staring at every colour in existence.
MAIN COLOUR
The colour you most want associated with the business.
DARK
Useful for text, contrast and darker areas.
SUPPORTING COLOUR
Gives you some variation and works well alongside the main colour.
LIGHT
Useful for backgrounds and balancing stronger colours.
You can always add another accent colour later if you genuinely need one. You don’t need to manufacture a huge palette simply because you think a brand is supposed to have one.
What About Colour Psychology?
Colours can influence how something feels, but don’t treat colour psychology as a set of instructions.
A deep navy and a pale baby blue are both blue, but they can create completely different impressions. The same colour can also feel very different depending on the fonts, photographs and other colours used around it.
So if you read that blue means trust, green means nature or red means energy, treat those ideas as useful considerations rather than rules.
There is much more to explore here, which we’ll cover separately in What Do Different Brand Colours Mean?
Make Sure Your Colours Work Somewhere Other Than a Colour Chart
Before committing to a palette, actually make something with it.
| TRY YOUR COLOURS ON: ✓ your logo |
You don’t need finished designs. You’re simply checking whether the colours still feel right once they’re doing an actual job.
If your palette only looks good as a row of perfectly arranged colour swatches, you haven’t really tested it yet.
Pretty Colours Still Need to Be Readable
Sometimes two colours look lovely beside each other but become almost impossible to read when one is used for text over the other.
That doesn’t necessarily mean either colour is wrong. It may simply mean they need different jobs.
A pale colour could make an excellent background but a terrible text colour. A strong colour might work beautifully for a button but become exhausting across an entire page.
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You Don’t Need Every Colour Everywhere
Having four brand colours doesn’t mean every design needs all four.
A social post might use your main colour and white. Your website might use mostly light and dark neutrals with small amounts of your main colour. An invoice might barely use colour at all.
They can still belong to the same business.
Before You Commit
YOUR BRAND COLOUR CHECK
• Do I genuinely like these colours?
• Do they suit the business I’m building?
• Do they work well together?
• Do I have useful light and dark options?
• Have I tried them on something other than colour swatches?
• Can I use only part of the palette and still make it feel like my business?
If the answers are comfortably yes, you’re probably ready to stop searching and start using them.
Your colours will become more recognisable as customers see them repeatedly. They don’t need to carry the entire personality of your business on their own.
They just need to give you a good foundation to build from.
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