HOW TO CREATE A FOOLPROOF BRANDING COLOR PALETTE

branding color palette no. 1

monochromatic

A monochromatic branding color palette is shades (darker) or tints (lighter) of ONE color on the color wheel.

Monochromatic palettes are one of the most popular color palettes used in branding but that doesn’t mean you’re destined to look like everyone else.

In terms of our Love Connection analogy think of this palette as the kissing cousins in the world of color.

Here are three real world brand examples of this ‘one color’ palette.

MIRANDA NAHMIAS

Miranda keeps it simple by using different tints and shades of pink for her branding color palette, which creates a beautiful contrast in her visuals.

Using a monochromatic palette like this makes stacking your elements slightly easier than some of the other palettes because of how closely related the colors are to each other.

Miranda uses her tints (the lighter colors) for her backgrounds and overlays and her shades (the darker colors) for her typography, which makes her text really pop while still maintaining a softness.

branding color palette no. 2

COMPLEMENTARY

 A complementary branding color palette features colors directly across from one another on the color wheel.

This type of palette is one of the most recognizable because of the organic complementary qualities of the two colors.

You can use the base colors, like purple and green, or you can use tints and shades of those two colors.

In terms of our Love Connection analogy think of a complementary color palette as a case of opposites attract. The ying to your yang, if you will. One is warm, one is cool, and together the two ‘opposites’ bring out the best of each other.

Here are two real world brand examples of complementary branding color palettes.

DESIGN YOUR OWN BLOG

Marianne at Design Your Own Blog uses an aqua and apricot pairing for her complementary branding color palette, along with some tints and shades of each of those colors.

Understand this, while a complementary palette will include colors across from each other on the color wheel, that doesn’t mean you can ONLY use the base colors on the wheel.

Think of tints and shades as the offspring of the base colors on the wheel. As long as the parent is the same, the generation doesn’t matter. Meaning, so long as you’re using tints and shades of a complementary pairing (in this case teal and orange), that is STILL a complementary branding color palette.

branding color palette no. 3

ANALOGOUS

An analogous branding color palette features colors that are next to each other on the color wheel.

Analogous color palettes are one of the most versatile color palettes for branding because the palette as a whole will usually share either all “warmer” qualities (like orange, red, and yellow) or “cooler” qualities (like purple, blue, and green).

Because of this harmony and built in flexibility creating a unique analogous branding color palette lends itself to an incredibly recognizable look, assuming you keep things consistent across your content.

As far as our Love Connection analogy goes think of analogous color palettes as more lifelong friends than a love affair. They’re familiar, closely related, and never far from the other. But hey, maybe one drunken night they hook up. Sometimes best friends turn into love connections…who are we to judge?

Here are three real world examples of an analogous branding color palette.

PAINTED SUMMERS

Allison over at Painted Summers uses an analogous color palette on the cooler side. You can see she’s got blue, green, purple, and even some magenta. Everything that’s hanging out on the top left side of the color wheel.

Notice how, even though there’s an abundance of color in her brand identity, it doesn’t feel distracting or haphazard.

branding color palette no. 4

TRIAD

A triad branding color palette feature three colors that are equidistant from one another on the color wheel.

This tends to be the toughest color palette for branding because it can become busy… quickly!

The key to success on this one is to keep one color more dominant in your brand identity and use the others as accent colors.

As far as our Love Connection analogy goes I would file this one under ‘open relationship’. The colors work well together but there’s usually a dominant one and a couple of ‘substitutes’ to spice things up when the urge arises.

Just like a real-life relationship, this open relationship isn’t for everyone. You have to be willing to work out the kinks and make sure everyone (or in this case every color) is getting what it needs. It’s more important than ever when it comes to a triad branding color palette that you define how you will use each color. Those who don’t, end up failing fast!

Here are two real world brand examples of a triad branding color palette.

FREEDOM HACKERS

Kimra over at Freedom Hackers has one of the most unique brand identities I’ve seen out there, and it features a triad branding color palette.

She has a dominant color, which is her dark navy, and then uses the other colors in her palette as accents on her decorative elements and typography.

Notice how doing that allows her to control where your eye goes in her content and designs?

A triad palette can accomplish this better than any other type of branding color palette IF you do it right, and Kimra has, there’s no doubt about that!

branding color palette no. 5

Neutral with a pop of color is a branding color palette that features all neutral colors with ONE color that pops off the rest. That pop of color can be bright and brilliant or more subtle in nature.

These types of color palettes have become really popular in the few years and for damn good reason.

The largely neutral elements create a clean backdrop for the real star, the POP of color, which is exactly how to make a specific swatch in your palette an iconic piece of your brand identity as a whole.

As far as our Love Connection analogy goes think of this color palette like the dynamic of a room or table full of family and/or friends. There’s almost always that one really big personality. Maybe they're loud and boisterous, maybe they're a social butterfly fluttering all over, or maybe they just have no filter. You know the one. We all have them in our lives. Or maybe you are the big personality. Guilty as charged for me!

This type of branding color palette functions in the same way as the dynamic of that table. No one part (or person) is greater than the others. It’s the palette (or table) as a whole that completes the experience.

Here are three real world brand examples of the neutral with a pop of color branding color palette.

While the look and feel of your branding color palette is going to be dictated by your brand essence, personality, and industry the genetic makeup of it will NOT be unique to you or your brand.

At least it shouldn’t be!

Don’t worry though my lil' unicorn, that doesn’t mean you have to bleed the same rainbow as anyone else, it just means that there’s a genetic structure you want to preserve to ensure your branding color palette has healthy genes.

In the first installment of this series, I showed you the five types of branding color palettes that reign supreme and how each of them works. In this second installment, I’m going to dissect the DNA of a branding color palette so you understand exactly what versatility you need to build into yours.

A branding color palette can be divided into four sections, each one fulfilling a very specific purpose, so let’s run through those in the order you should define them.

As we go through each section I’m going to give you an example courtesy of my client The Over 50 Roadmap so you can see a real world branding color palette in action. At the end of this installment, I’ll show you a side-by-side of their entire palette and their website homepage so you can see it all at a glance.

branding color palette section no. 1

Website Backgrounds and Text Colors

Let’s get the least visionary section out of the way first because I know your unicorn veins run thick with creativity and this category is not where you need to use much of that.

The first two colors you need to define for your branding color palette are for backgrounds and text on your website and throughout your content. These colors should be as far on the intensity scale of color (which I show you in the 3rd installment of this series) as you can get away with. Meaning, as close to black and white as will fit in the brand identity suite you’re creating.

Readability is of the utmost importance here which is why I want you to keep it basic on these two “colors” (you’ll understand the quotes in just a minute).

Let me make these two a no-brainer for you.

YOUR OPTIONS FOR THE DARK COLOR ARE:

Choose whichever option blends best with the branding color palette you’ve chosen and the overall style of your brand identity suite.

YOUR OPTIONS FOR THE LIGHT COLOR ARE:

Yep, that’s it, just white.

Unless you want to time-travel back to the early 2000’s when colored backgrounds on websites were all the rage, I highly recommend you stick to white. White won’t wash out the rest of your unicorn fabulous color palette (in case that’s what you were thinking), it’s simply priming your branding color palette for maximum usability by creating a nice clean canvas to work with.

brand color palette section no. 2

Iconic Brand Color

The next color you’ll need for your branding color palette is an iconic color which is the color that will be most widely associated with your brand. In other words, when people see this color they know you’re behind the content without ever having to read a word. THAT’S brand recognition, baby!

This color will be the dominant color used across your visuals; including your logo, your social feeds, and your website, so this color has to capture the essence of your brand belief system.

If you’ve chosen a triad branding color palette (which is one of the five types of color palettes I showed you in the first installment of this series) this will be the main color we talked about, so you’ll want to build your palette around this color.

branding color palette section no. 3

Action Color

Next up, you’re going to need an action color which will be used for your buttons, links, and calls to actions.

By reserving this color for these action elements only you’ll increase the potency of those elements. In other words, that shit will be POPPIN’ like ‘look at me!’ without you having to scream it. Quickly, your readers’ eyeballs will be primed for that color. Their eyes will naturally be drawn to it like a moth to a flame, which is the first step in getting them to take action, right?

First, they have to see the button (link, CTA, etc.), then they can click that sumabitch!

When it comes to your action color, make sure it pairs smashingly (another very technical term) well with your iconic color because more often than not these will be the two colors paired together most frequently in your designs and content.

branding color palette section no. 4

Accent Colors

The last section of your branding color palette is reserved for your accent colors (which can range from 1-3 swatches depending on your preference). These are the colors you’ll use to interrupt your dominate + action color pairing when you want to accentuate or highlight something special.

There are endless ways to use your accent colors but here are just two of my favorites…

ASSIGN your accent colors TO SPECIFIC CONTENT

Assign each of your accent colors to a specific type of content, topic, or product. For example, all of your podcast episodes use one accent color and all of your written posts use another.

Color coding like this will help your audience spot new content that hits the spot when they’re cruising around the web. If they love your podcast and they know those visuals are always red, when they see that red pop up in their feed they’re going to be much more likely to pause their scrolling to get their click on.

This is also great for creating super clear content paths on your website. Kinda like follow the yellow brick road, only with the color of your choosing.

Here's an example from Bushra from Persuasion Revolution, who I mentioned in the first installment of this series.

USE your accent colors IN YOUR FEATURED IMAGES

Accent colors are also great for creating a signature background for your featured images.

You can create a tricolor gradient overlay or alternate your accent colors as a solid background in your images.

BONUS: The latter will save you a fuckton of time scouring the internt for that perfect stock photo too… and who wouldn’t mind more time being put back into their day? That alone is reason enough to consider trying the approach!

However you choose to use the accent colors in your branding color palette make sure that they fit into the scheme of the palette you’ve chosen. That means, if you’ve chosen a monochromatic color palette (which is another type of palette I showed you in the first installment of this series) then your accent colors will be tints and shades of your chosen base color.

THE OVER 50 ROADMAP

FINAL BRAND COLOR PALETTE + WEBSITE HOMEPAGE

NEXT steps

If you stick to this DNA profile you’ll end up with a branding color palette made up of 5-7 colors, which you'll actually know how and when to use!

Now that we’ve explored the five types of branding color palettes you can choose from and broken down the DNA makeup you want to model yours after, there's only one thing left to do. Create your color palette!

In the 3rd and final installment in this series I’m sharing four idiot-proof ways you can create your color palette from scratch in under an hour (even if you've tried and failed countless times before).

BRANDING COLOR PALETTE tool no. 1

COLOURLOVERS

KEYWORDS

Use descriptive words that describe your brand or represent characteristics of it. For instance, if I was building a holistic coaching brand I might search for keywords like zen, soothing, or meditation.

This’ll give you a great starting off point if you’re looking for creative direction for your color palette.

SPECIFIC HEX CODE

If you already have a specific color you know you want to use, you can enter the hex code in their search filter and browse all the palettes they’ve got with that specific color in it.

This is a great way to get some inspiration for your branding palette when you have a starting point but you’re lost on how to round out your color scheme.

Pair what you have learned about color relationships in the first installment of this series with the inspiration on COLOURlovers and you’re going to have a failproof branding color palette in no time.

GENERIC COLORS:

If you know the general colors you want in your palette, you can use their ‘Hue’ filter to choose up to three different base colors. For instance, if I continue with the holistic brand from before, I might search palettes that feature blues and greens.

Once you select the base colors you want you’ll be able to browse all the color palettes they’ve got with all of those colors in it.

BRANDING COLOR PALETTE tool no. 2

ADOBE COLOR CC

Adobe Color CC is a fully loaded color finder and color palette creator that has tons of features.

When you land on their homepage, you'll find a color wheel with each of the palettes we talked about in the first installment of this color palette series listed to the left (see screenshot below).

Once you select the type of branding color palette you want to create, it will manipulate the color wheel so that only color combinations that fit into that scheme are created. You can then drag the points to different areas of the color wheel while it maintains the palette type you’ve chosen.

As you drag the points around the color wheel the colors will update in the five swatches below the wheel. When you find a color you want, you can click on that square and grab the RGB and hex code for that specific color.

You can even slide the controls for each of the additives (red, green, and blue) on any specific color to get the shade or tint just right.

Can you say COOL AF?! And this is just the beginning of what you can do with Adobe Color CC.

USING A PHOTOGRAPH

My favorite feature, by far, is the ability to create a branding color palette from a photograph.

Often times you can find a photograph that, while unrelated to your brand, really captures the essence of your brand or maybe just the essence of the style you’re going for, but how do you take that photograph and build from it?

You turn that photograph into your branding color palette, that’s how!

Here’s how to do that…

Upload your photograph to Adobe Color CC using the camera icon in the top right corner. Once that’s uploaded you’ll see your photograph on the screen with five color palette swatches below it. You’ll also see a box on the left side that has six prompts: colorful, bright, muted, deep, dark, and custom. When you click on one of those prompts it will update the swatches based on your selection.

Then, you can click on any of the swatches and drag that point (which is represented by a circle in the color of that swatch, with a plus sign in it) in the photo to update the color of that specific swatch.

When you get a full color palette or a single color that you want to use, you can click the color wheel icon (which is in the same place the camera icon was in) to get back to the color wheel screen where you can grab the RGB and hex codes for those swatches.

It’s really skies the limit here! This tool can turn a little productive play time into a failproof branding color palette faster than you’ll ever be able to do in your head.

branding color palette tool no. 3

COLORZILLA

Colorzilla is a Firefox and Chrome browser extension that’ll help you swipe the specific hex codes and/or RGB values from anywhere on the web, including whole webpages.

That means, no more seeing an image with that perfect shade and having to wonder what the color is.

The Colorzilla extension comes with a couple of cool features for color swiping so let me show you how it works.

Once you load the extension in your browser, you’ll have a color picker icon available on your browser bar. When you click that icon it’ll open the menu you see below.

If you choose the ‘Page Color Picker’ option, a black bar will appear at the top of your screen, like the one you see in the screenshot below.

You can then hover the crossbar that appears over the color you want to swipe. Once you click on what you want, the color will be saved to your clipboard and to the extension, and the black bar will disappear.

Then, you can either paste the hex code that’s saved to your clipboard to a document or you can click the color picker icon and choose the ‘Color Picker’ option, which will open the window you see in the image below. From there you can save your swatch, or grab the RGB values.

You can also click the eye dropper icon and select ‘Webpage Color Analyzer’ and it’ll pull in every color used on the current page you’re on.

Yep, that’s The Branded Solopreneur (my previous brand) color palette that you can now swipe. But you better not… you don’t want to poke this bear. RAWR! 👉🏽🐻🚫

As promised here’s the bonus method…

BRANDING COLOR PALETTE tool no. 4

Design Seeds

If you’re a no fuss kinda solopreneur and would prefer more of a done for you approach, boy have I got the resource for you, it’s called Design Seeds.

Jessica, the founder of Design Seeds, turns gorgeous Instagram photos into inspiring color palettes (see an example below) and offers them up for grabs.

You can search her color palettes by color (see a screenshot of her color page below), or by collection, which includes categories like The Seasons, In Nature, and Edible Hues, which is where I snagged the coffeelicious palette above.

Tell me you’re not inspired. I DARE YOU!