How to Choose Your Brand Colours

One of the most important parts of the branding process is choosing your brand’s colours. Colour is a powerful tool, and your brand colours not only represent your brand’s identity but also evokes certain emotions and influences your client’s decision making.

Identify your brand essence

The first step to choosing your brand colours is to establish what your brand stands for; its goals, target audience and how you want your clients to feel. If your brand was a person, which personality traits would it have? Would it be feminine, elegant and classy or would it be playful, loud and adventurous?

Understand what colours symbolise

Colours convey meaning, values and emotions. Choose colours that represent your brand essence. Here is a list of the symbolic meaning of colours:

Red is associated with fire, violence, and warfare. In contrast, it is also associated with love and passion.
Pink is feminine, it’s sentimental and romantic. Different shades, like hot pink, can be youthful and bold.
Orange is a very vibrant and energetic colour and is also strongly associated with earth, health, vitality, playfulness and creativity.
Yellow is associated with sunshine, happiness and hope but it can also be associated with danger.
Green is a down to earth colour associated with nature, renewal, new beginnings and growth but it also signifies wealth, stability and abundance.
Blue is a popular colour as it represents calmness, peace, strength, intelligence, reliability and responsibility.
Purple is well known to be associated with wealth, luxury and royalty but it also communicates romance, imagination and creativity.
Black is a versatile colour which is commonly associated with mystery, power, sophistication, elegance and formality.
White is another versatile colour which is commonly associated with purity, cleanliness and virtue.
Grey is generally conservative, sophisticated and formal but it can have a somber feel to it.
Brown is a warm natural colour associated with earth, wood and stone. Brown communicates dependability, reliability and steadfastness.

The brand colours for CF Communications were chosen to represent the brand as courageous, warm, confident, creative, friendly, high energy, innovative and passionate, but also feminine and playful.

Choosing colours

Choose a primary colour for your brand. This will be the colour that is most associated with your brand. For example, the primary brand colour for CF Communications is Persimmon, an orangy pink tone. Next, you need to pick two to four colours to go along with your primary colour. These colours should complement your primary colour. Your secondary colours can be variants of your primary colour such as orange with red or you can choose various shades of your primary colour such as shades of red. Another option would be to choose contrasting colours to your primary colour, these are colours located right across from each other on the colour wheel, an example of this would be red and green. The complimentary colours for CF Communications are hot pink, coral and hit grey.

Choosing colours can be a difficult process because the symbolism and shade of the colours can make a big difference to your client’s perception of your brand.

View the Martian Colour Wheel here:

CF Communications offers a full-process graphic design service, from concept to final artwork, from web to print that are truly tailored to meet your brand’s needs. We can create all the design and branding elements you need to provide your business with a professional and unique look and feel, saving you time and money, leaving you to do what you do best.

Find out more.

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