The Power of Colour

Colour is a powerful tool in graphic design. It can help to define a brand look, elicit a mood or feeling, and serve as a design direction. The cultural associations that underlie colour meanings can impact the way people perceive brands and their messaging. As a designer, it’s important to choose your colour palette in a purposeful way. Let's explore the process of creating a colour palette for your brand and why it’s important.

Emotions and Qualities

Before choosing your colours, it’s important to set down some ideas about the emotions and qualities you would like your colours to elicit. Do you want your brand to feel bold, authoritative, cheeky, modern, or romantic? Once you have a clear idea of what you want to convey, you can start to choose your colours. You can select colours by tonal range or by using a colour wheel to create analogous, complementary, and triadic colour schemes. Depending on how extensive your brand work is, you may want to create a palette that includes primary and secondary colours as well.

Colour Palettes

Another way to select colours is to start with a photograph that you feel embodies the mood or feeling you want to convey. You can then upload it to a colour palette generator to extract colour codes for the predominant colours in it. This can be a great way to select colours that are cohesive and work well together. Finally, you can use a colour palette template to keep and share your chosen colours. These templates make it easy to replicate your colour palette across all your design assets.

When creating your colour palette, it's important to specify colour codes for each colour. There are a few standard systems for colour identification, including RGB, HSV, CMYK, and HEX. For digital media, HEX is the most common. Make sure to document your colour codes for future reference and consistency.

Creating a purposeful colour palette is important because it makes it easy to replicate those exact colours when creating design assets later. This level of consistency helps to build brand recognition and makes your brand more memorable. Customers will associate your brand with the colours you choose, so it's important to choose colours that accurately reflect your brand personality and messaging.

Choosing a colour palette for your brand is an important part of the design process. It can help to define your brand look, elicit a mood or feeling, and serve as a design direction. By setting down ideas about the emotions and qualities you want to convey, selecting colours by tonal range or using a colour wheel, and specifying colour codes for each colour, you can create a purposeful colour palette that accurately reflects your brand personality and messaging. This level of consistency helps to build brand recognition and makes your brand more memorable.