7 Tips On How To Pick Your Brand Colours

Brand Design Tips

Sep 12

It’s the first question you asked your new best friend, aged 8 in the playground… What’s your favourite colour?

Your brand colours may not be your all time favourite colour, they could set the tone you want for your brand.

Generally when picking your brand colours, you naturally already know what colours you’re attracted to.

For me it was bright pink, now that’s not to say that my flat looks like Elle Woods sorority bedroom BUT I did have lots of gorgeous bright pink items of clothing.

When I was creating my Brand Pinterest Board pink just kept on popping up alongside grey, there just so happened to be a marble sculptor 5 minutes from my home with giant slabs of marble to use as backdrops and boom my website look was complete.

Now I’m going to share with you some ideas for how you can find your Brand Colours and then the more techy bit of how to use the colours for your website and branding materials.

How to pick your brand colours:

1. Look around you

Go through your wardrobe, see which colours are prominent (aside from, the obligatory 70% black items if you’re anything like me). Look around your home, do you buy a particular colour repeatedly? One client of mine had green everything, vases, jade elephants, fruit bowls etc.

2. Pinterest

Create a brand pinterest board with inspirational images to inspire you and see what colours you keep on pinning.

3. Colours from an image

On the html colour codes website you can upload the image you like with the colour you want for your brand. So if you have a shot from Pinterest that you love, upload it and then using your mouse, click on the colour you like and voila the HEX colour code appears below.

4. Convert your colours

When you have a colour code in say for instance in CMYK (that’s the code Printers need) and you want to know the HEX code (that’s what you need for your website) you can input it into this website and it’ll automatically translate that particular colour code into all the other types.

5. Mix & Match

Want to know what colours are compliment your picked new brand colours? What various shades, tints and tones go well with your main colours? Check out the HTML Color Code website, where you can find out all of these things. It’s the bomb diggity!

6. Primary & Secondary Colours

For your website and social media you’ll want to create 2-3 primary ‘main’ colours which are more prominent and then 2-5 secondary colours which are often softer than your main colours and complementary.

7. How To Use Them

Now you have all of your colours sorted, you have the various codes you need so you can use them in your website and for anything you need to get printed - what do you do with them???

That’s the exciting thing for me. I picked up my colours in the outfits that I wore for my brand photoshoot.

*TOP TIP, if you don’t want green to be a brand colour, then don’t have lots of shots taken with trees/grass behind you because that will be extremely prominent in your branding/website.

You can use your colours in your fonts and titles. Your Logo could contain one or more colours. You may pick a block colour for banners at the top of your website, in a secondary colour so that it’s softer. Pepper your Instagram with coloured squares in all of your shades with quotes and client testimonials that you’ve created in the app Wordswag