How to choose brand colours that go together

How to choose brand colours that go together

This is the third blog in a series about choosing the right colours for your brand - start with seasonal colour theory, and then colour psychology, and now you need to narrow down your choice and pick the actual colours you'll use - and they need to go together too! 

How to choose specific colours for your brand

So you've had a look into what colours mean, and the kind of colours that go with your brand season.  Now it's time to actually start deciding on the right colours for your brand!

- You could have a look at colour schemes on Pinterest for inspiration (just make sure they they are using the right colours for your season before you choose a set that someone else has put together).

– You could collect paint colour charts from a DIY store to go through and see what goes together and what feels right for your values, personality and brand style See the previous two blogs if you don’t know what that is yet.

– Make a long list selection of colours you love, that reflect your values and everything else I’ve been talking about.  Make sure they all belong to the same season.  Then narrow it down to your short list.  Use the colour scheme info below to choose colours that will go together and give the right look and feel you want for your branding.

Continue checking they belong to the same season with the same attributes mentioned above, and that overall they give the right impression, mood, look and feel of your brand that you want them to.

It’s important to get this right.  Colour helps people to recognise your brand – research shows colours help brand recognition by up to 80%.  So then when you have them sorted, you need to make sure that you are using them consistently everywhere!  It's not the end of the world if you want to change them at some point though, but it will help that brand recognition if you update them by just adding in one new colour, or changing one colour, than totally changing the whole look of your brand by swapping to totally different colours!

Colour Schemes   

You need to consider how different colours go together too.  See the colour wheel diagram below...

Where you choose your colours from on the colour wheel, will determine how warm, cool, bright, calm, vibrant, subtle or jarring your website and other content looks. 

Complementary colours are from opposite sides of the colour wheel – they are visually exciting but compete with each other, so use more of one and less of the other rather than in equal amounts.  Use one to stand out against the other when you use less of it, such as for your website call to action buttons.

A split complementary colour scheme uses the two colours either side of one of those complementary colours, to give you three.  This will add more variety, and won’t be quite so tense as just using two complementary colours.

Analogous colours are those that sit right next to each other on the colour wheel.  Using these in your brand will be much calmer than complementary colours, but it will be harder to get something to stand out.

Monochromatic colour schemes use a range of the tones, shades and tints of a single colour.  Tints of a colour have white added to them in varying amounts, making the colour less intense, and lighter or a pastel.  Shades of a colour have black added to them in varying amounts, making the colour darker and not so bright.  Tones of a colour have grey added, so both black and white, in varying amounts, reducing the intensity of the colour. As with analogous colour schemes, it will be harder for something to stand out, so these and monochromatic schemes often have a single complementary colour too.

Remember that using your brand season will really help you to choose colours that go together

See my previous blog for an introduction to using seasonal colour theory for creating your brand visual identity.  If you're not feeling very creative, using this method makes it much easier to choose your colours yourself, along with styling the rest of your brand.  When you choose your brand colours from the same season, and all the rest of your branding, it will all go together and give you ideas for how to design all your branding to match.

See the chart just below – Spring colours are warm, light and bright.  Summer colours are cool, delicate and muted (with a few deeper tones like classic dark blue and British racing green too).  Autumn colours are warm, intense and darker.  Winter colours are cool, bright and strong, dark and light, plus icy tints and pure black and white.

When you’ve chosen the colours you want to represent your brand, adjust them to fit your season by using the right shade, tint, tone or pure colour hue.  If you don’t know your brand style and the right season to use for your brand so that you can use this method, then take my quiz to find out: Discover Your Perfect Brand Style Quiz.  And then your colours will definitely all go together.

There are more tips for choosing the right colours for your brand and business in my previous blog: How to choose your brand colours using colour psychology.

I hope that was interesting!  So do your existing brand colours give the right impression of your brand, and reflect you and your brand values?  Do they come from the same season too and all go together really well?  Or do you need to adjust them a little, or even give your brand a whole new look?  Or if you’re starting your brand from scratch, I hope this really helped you to get your colours right 🙂 

Next Steps:

- Have you taken my free quiz yet?  Find it here:  Discover Your Brand Style Quiz.  Once you've done that, take my self study course, From Brand Confusion To Brand Clarity - how to find your brand vibe, to work out your brand keywords that will keep your whole brand and branding cohesive and consistent, thus becoming more recognisable and memorable, improving trust and encouraging buyers.

- Next up is my whole course taking you through step by step how to design your beautiful branding yourself (even if you're not feeling creative!).  From Drab To Fab will be ready soon!

- Ready for more personal mentoring, brand, visibility and marketing strategies that work for you, a community of fellow ambitious introverts, training, and accountability to put it all into action?  Come and join my Brand Plan membership, and get support to show up, stand out, and sell more🤩

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Blog topics / categories: 

#All Things Brand

[This blog was first written in August 2020, then transferred to this website, split into two blogs and updated, January 2024]