It’s a while since I wrote about colour, and it’s such an important topic that I think it’s time to pick it up again!
Colour is crucial in helping your brand become recognisable and communicating with your audience. Did you know that 84.7% of buying decisions are affected by colour and 80% of brand recognition is enhanced by colour?
Colour creates an emotional reaction that’s worth considering when you’re working on your brand identity.
What do you do if you already have some colours for your brand, but you want to use MORE colours as the ones you have just aren’t enough?
KEEP IT SMALL
Don’t be tempted to use more colours! Your brand will be stronger if you keep your palette small and simple. If you’re a rainbow of different colours then it’s going to be harder to stand out, be remembered and gain that emotional reaction you’re hoping for. Think of ways to just use the colours you already have. If you MUST add more colours, then keep it to a minimum. You don’t want a palette of 45 colours. You don’t just want a strong brand, but you need an easy life too!
LIGHTEN UP
Sometimes, this isn’t going to cut it for you – or maybe you only want one extra colour. The easiest way is to take your existing colours and make a lighter shade of each. One way to do this is to pop the code into www.colorpicker.com/ and slide the slider along towards the white to find a lighter shade that you like.
PLAY ABOUT
Go to a paint shop and grab a whole load of paint charts, lay them out and play with them. See what works with your existing colours and what doesn’t and then work out the codes (you could “scan” them with a free app called “Kolormondo”)
RESEARCH
Another option – great if you can’t get out or if you need to see how colours work together in a palette because you don’t have an eye for colour, is to use www.design-seeds.com/by-color/ (or Pinterest!) You can find colour palettes which include your existing colours so you can see which colours work best. You can upload images (or colour palettes) here > http://imagecolorpicker.com/ to find out what the codes are.
What are these codes I’m on about?
There are loads of different codes for each colour. The ones you’ll mostly find on these links are the hex codes, the ones that look like this > #FFFFFF (that’s white) this stands for hexadecimal which is a series of 6 digits – they could be letters or numbers – representing the red, blue and green parts that make up the colour. These are really handy when you’re popping your colours into canva or wordpress.
Along with RGB (Red, Green and Blue colour codes – very similar) you’ll use these codes online when you’re creating social media graphics or building your website for example.
For print, you’ll be looking for CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Black)) which tells you the percentage of each used to make up the colour. You might also find the Pantone colour codes which are good for ensuring that your colours are all matched up perfectly – these are the worldwide standard for colour communication.