Choosing Your Brand Colour Palette (It's Not a Matter of Taste)

When a client tells us "I want blue" or "I really like green," we know the most interesting conversation of the project has just begun. Colour is probably the brand decision made most on instinct and least on judgement, which is exactly backwards.

A brand's colour doesn't decorate an identity that's already built: it builds it. It acts before the logo, before the copy, before any rational argument the business wants to make. That's why it can't be left to the personal taste of whoever signs off on the project, or to the favourite colour of whoever's paying the invoice.

Choosing brand colour well is an exercise in strategy that happens to use visual tools. Not an aesthetic exercise with a justification bolted on afterwards to make it sound serious.

01Colour isn't a matter of taste

The most common mistake starts with the question itself. "What colour do I like" is the wrong question, even though it's the one nearly every business asks first. The right one is different: what does this brand need to communicate, to whom, and in what market.

You can love a colour and have it be exactly wrong for your business. That green you're drawn to might work beautifully for a natural cosmetics brand and jar in a financial firm that needs to project solidity. Personal taste is real, but it has no obligation to line up with what your target audience needs to perceive.

This doesn't mean the result should leave you cold. It means the deciding criterion can't be "I like it" but rather "it's consistent with what this brand needs to be." When both things line up, even better. When they don't, strategy wins.

02Colour psychology, applied with rigour and without myths

There's an entire industry of glib claims about colour: red increases sales, blue automatically builds trust, yellow stimulates appetite. These lines circulate as if they were laws of physics. They aren't.

What does hold up is consistent evidence that colour triggers cultural associations, and those associations shape how a brand is perceived visually before anyone has consciously processed the content. The key nuance is that those associations depend on context: sector, geography, what other colours sit alongside it, and how it's applied. The same blue can read as institutional trust in a bank and as cold distance in a brand that needs warmth. Taking colour psychology seriously means understanding those nuances, not memorising a "colours and meanings" chart and applying it blindly.

Key point: colour psychology doesn't offer universal answers. It offers a framework of cultural associations that has to be interpreted in the context of each brand, sector and audience. Treating it as a fixed formula is as risky as ignoring it altogether.

03Colour should be derived from positioning and audience

Just as with typography, colour needs to answer positioning questions before it becomes a visual decision. What role does this brand occupy in its sector? Is it speaking to an audience that values restraint, or one that rewards visibility? Does it compete on price, prestige, warmth or innovation?

A premium brand aiming for exclusivity rarely leans on highly saturated, attention-grabbing colours: it tends to work with restrained palettes, well-chosen neutrals and a single accent used with discipline. A younger brand trying to stand out in a category full of serious-looking competitors might benefit from the opposite: an unusual colour for its category, used with confidence.

Neither approach is better in the abstract. Each is better or worse depending on what that specific brand needs to communicate to that specific audience. That's why a palette should never be defined before positioning is clear: doing it the other way round is like picking an outfit before knowing what the occasion is. A "pretty" palette isn't the same as a right one — it can be visually pleasant and, at the same time, communicate something that has nothing to do with what the brand needs to project.

04Contrast and accessibility: the technical part that isn't optional

A palette can work perfectly on a moodboard and fail the moment it becomes a real website. The reason is almost always the same: insufficient contrast between text and background, or between interactive elements and their surroundings. Contrast determines whether someone with low vision can read your site, whether text holds up in direct sunlight on a phone screen, whether a button reads as clickable or goes unnoticed. Accessibility standards, such as the WCAG guidelines, set minimum contrast ratios between text and background, and a well-built palette should be able to meet them without constant exceptions.

This has a practical consequence: some colours that work well as a punchy accent are unusable as body text or as a large background field. A vibrant yellow can be a great brand colour and, at the same time, a terrible choice for legible text on white. A complete palette accounts for these uses from the start, rather than discovering the problem once everything is already designed.

05Coherence between the palette and its real-world use

A brand's colour palette doesn't live in a brand guidelines file. It lives on the website, on a shop's signage, on social media, on stationery, on a branded vehicle, and each of those surfaces behaves differently: the natural light hitting a storefront isn't the light of a screen, vinyl printing doesn't reproduce colour the way a digital file does, and what looks perfect in an Instagram feed can lose nuance on a building facade.

A solid identity plans for this. It defines not just the colours but how they behave in each application, which version is used on a dark background, and how they coexist with surfaces you don't fully control, like shared signage in a shopping centre.

When that coherence is missing, the brand reads differently depending on where you encounter it. That inconsistency, however minor it seems, is one of the quietest ways trust erodes: the customer can't quite explain why, but something doesn't add up between what they see on the website and what they see in the shop.

06The most common mistakes when defining a brand palette

A handful of patterns repeat constantly, and nearly all share the same root cause: deciding on colour before knowing what it's for.

Too many colours at the same weight. A palette with six or seven "brand colours," all carrying equal hierarchy, is a palette with no real hierarchy at all. The identity doesn't know which colour to use in which context, and ends up feeling inconsistent even when each individual colour is fine on its own.

Palettes that don't work digitally. Colours tested only on paper or in a physical sample that turn out illegible, garish or muddy on screen. Digital has its own colour logic, and a modern palette needs to be tested there from day one.

Palettes copied from competitors. Looking at what the category leader uses and adopting something similar "because it works for them" is a frequent mistake. The best-case outcome is a brand that blends in. The worst case is outright confusion between brands.

Changing the palette without revisiting the whole system. Colour interacts with typography, shapes and spacing. Changing it in an already-built brand without checking how it fits the rest of the system usually produces patched-together results that never quite feel coherent.

A well-resolved brand palette doesn't read as effort. It reads as evidence — this brand knows exactly who it is. If you're reviewing your brand identity or want to see how we've approached this decision on real projects, take a look at our projects or get in touch to talk about yours.