Identifying colors for your business’ branding requires you to be strategic and conscientious in your choices. Color expresses purpose, emotion, and individuality, and these expressions can and do change depending on the audience you are addressing. Your color scheme will produce a visual reflection of the message you present to the public. These visuals need to resonate with your tone and message. Selecting the wrong colors may result in the loss of engagement, sales, and negative perception by the market you are attempting to attract. Color plays a pivotal position in a brand’s effectiveness; therefore, one must consider it carefully.
One way of developing a robust – indeed, even an excellent color scheme is to utilize the color palettes in nature. The first step is to find an image, any image, that resonates with the emotions that you want your organization to embody. For example: If your business wants to elicit feelings of joy and happiness, you may look to the tulip fields in the North & South Holland providences of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. If you look to reflect a global consciousness of the environment, utilizing images of the ocean or Amazon jungle may be more appropriate.
The 2nd step is to upload your selected image to a palette building platform such as Pantone Connect,* Adobe Color, and Coolors. All of these sites will produce an instant color palette from your chosen image. You can also move the color reference points around to alter the original selection and develop a more customized palette.
Once you are happy with your color choices, you will need to capture this information to use in assets, such as your logo, business cards, and website. There are several ways that you can save this information. One, you can take a screen capture, so you have all of the color names provided by the site. Two, you can write everything down. Three, you can save the palette and download it to your computer to share with your designer or marketing staff.
Adobe Color provides Hexidecimal codes (#FAFAFA), RGB formula, LAB formula, and HSB formula; these are great for websites and digital applications.** They also give the CMYK formula used in printing.
Pantone Connect provides options for color consistency when dealing with spot colors, four-process printing, and digital display. By right-clicking a color swatch, you can obtain the spot color (Pantone color name), CMYK formula, sRGB code, Hexidecimal code, and LAB formula.
From the Coolors website, you can obtain the CMYK formula, sRGB code, Hexidecimal code, and LAB formula. These codes and formulas provide you with every color mode you need for print or digital use.
Before you finalize your palette selection, you may want to review the color associations with the culture/subculture you are focusing on. Many cultures have different connections with color. You want to ensure that you are not accidentally using color in a manner that would be incongruent with your intended message. Reviewing your color selection could include meeting with community representatives and obtaining feedback about how your color palette is perceived.
Now that you have developed a palette, you need to determine which colors you want to include in the logo and what colors, if any, should be used as accents. Once you finalize the palette and color usage, you will need to distribute the color standards to your marketing team. Your internal and external team members need these to ensure the correct use of your colors across your assets.
If you feel that this is a daunting process and prefer to hand off this task, give Neurotic Dog Studios a call at 804.464.3925, schedule an appointment at bit.ly/MeetNDS or email us through our Contact page.
*Pantone Connect does require an account but, at the time of this writing, it is free to sign up and use this service. To pull colors from an image, use the “extract” feature found on the left-hand side of the user interface.
**For more information on digital color formulas, visit: https://donatbalipapp.medium.com/colours-maths-90346fb5abda
***See our RGB, CMYK, and Spot Color page for more details.