Choosing Colour
Colour is a tricky one. How do you know what colours to use for your brand? Your graphics? Your text? Your ANYTHING!?
In DIY Design My Biz colour seems to be one of the areas my students to struggle with the most. They feel stuck, overwhelmed and often want to give up!
Thankfully, I share with them some tools and tips to help keep them going (plus our little Facebook community definitely helps)! But what about you? If you’re not apart of the course I wanted to help you too - to give you a couple of pointers to get you started and hopefully feeling a lot more confident when it comes to choosing colours for your graphics.
So, let’s get started! Here’s what you need to know.
Start here 👇
Before you skip too far ahead I need you to know: when creating graphics for your biz they should almost ALWAYS fit within your “visual branding”. A visual brand is the guidelines you (or your designer) have set out for your business. Think of it as a set of rules that govern what your graphics look like. You should have a few fonts that you always use, a graphic style you always use AND a set of colours you always use.
These colours are usually called your “brand colour palette” and usually consist of 3-6 colours that you come back to for every design that you work on (you don’t have to use all of them in each design!).
This makes sure your brand stays recognisable and consistent.
When creating your brand colour palette your priority is to make sure your colours appeal and connect to your “target audience” - the group of people you have decided that your businesses main goal is to serve (and no, you can’t pick everyone - get specific!)
This blog will outline a few different tips around creating your colour palette.
What do colours mean?
Each different colour has a certain feeling or connotation it elicits from the viewer. It’s important to know that these are not final and not how everyone interprets these but it is a helpful thing to consider as you begin choosing the colours you’d like to use.
You’ll need to think about the emotions and connotations you want to communicate when someone looks at your brand. When they see your business what do you want them to feel?
Let’s have a look:
Red: Passion, love, danger, strength.
Pink: Romantic, feminine, love, sensitivity, exciting, playful
Yellow: Optimism, sunshine, joy, confidence, attention, success
Green: Health, growth, environment, peace, wealth
Orange: Energy, happiness, success, warmth, creativity, hunger
Blue: Trust, peace, communication, sadness, serenity, corporate
Purple: Royal, mystery, spirituality, luxury
Brown: Organic, honest, natural, simple, wholesome
Grey: Compromise, neutral, balance, conservative, frustration
Black: Elegance, power, luxury, mystery, sorrow
White: Pure, simple, clean, innocence, minimalism
Now, it’s also good to remember that different shades or tones of these colours can mean something slightly different too! Think of how a fluro pink says something totally different than a soft rose pink.
A good thing to remember is to keep your colours in the same “voice”... like all soft, or all vibrant, or all dull, or all earthy, etc. Just to make things consistent and not confusing for your audience.
Before you get too far in choosing your colours too be sure to consider your target audience! After-all, they are the ones that will need to be attracted to your colours.
Who is your business serving?
Who are you trying to speak to?
Once you know your target audience you can consider the kind of colours the majority of them will be drawn to. We will always need to generalise here as we often think females will like pink..but we also know that not every female will like pink!
Can I have some help picking colours?
Yes! I’m glad you asked 😉
There are some great tools to help you pick colours for your brand! Here are some of my favourites:
Pinterest.com is pretty much a glorified (for good reason) Google images! It’s a FABULOUS place to go to find image inspiration. I know a lot of my clients (and myself) love it for finding ideas around fonts, colours, images and design styles and layouts. If you’re doing any of your own design work PLEASE get familiar with Pinterest - you can thank me later.
So, let’s look in to how Pinterest can help with choosing colours.
You can search wording that you want your brand or graphic to encompass and it will bring up colour palettes others have created that you can use as inspiration.
ie. “feminine colour palette”, “beachy colour palette”, “bright colours” - anything that you feel will connect with and appeal to your target audience!
Once you’ve found some images you like you can either use that whole colour palette or you can do some mix-and-matching!
Before we go any further I need to catch you up on some info you’ll need to know:
Hex Code: Colours on the web are usually determined by a 6 digit/letter combo that defines a particular colour, you can recognise it because it will always begin with hashtag (#).
To find out what “hex code” a colour is that you have found online, just save the image with the colour on it to your computer and head to Image Colour Picker. Upload the image and click on the area to get it to generate the appropriate hex code.
To use the hex codes you find just copy and paste it (it’ll look something like #000000) into your design software. Ie. in Canva select the object you want to make a certain colour, click the colour selector and paste the hex code into the search bar.
Now it’s time to choose your exact colours, here are some tools I love:
ADOBE COLOR
This is a free tool that helps you choose colours. You can just move your cursor around the colour wheel to begin selecting colours, or you can select a colour and press one of the buttons on the left-hand side to have it pick colours for you based off the original colour you chose and how other colours relate to it!
Once you’ve selected the colours you like (you can create a palette of up to 6 colours), you’ll see the hex codes for each different colour just underneath the colour square - copy and paste that code into your design program to use!
Adobe has a second tool you can access on the same page! Just click the tab “Extract from an Image” at the top left (next to “Color Wheel”) and there you can upload an image you like the colours in and get picking! Say you have a photo you love the colour in - simply upload this photo and either move the circles to where you’d like to sample the colour from.
It might get a bit fiddy as there are SO many variations of the same colour - just keep moving the circles around slowly until you hit that perfect colour - it should look good with the other colours you’ve selected and be in the same “voice” (as I mentioned earlier).
OR let Adobe choose the colours for you by selecting which “mood” you’d like on the left hand panel! (ie. Colourful, Bright, Muted…)
CANVA COLOUR PALETTE GENERATOR
Canva Colour Palette Generator
Canva has recently released its own colour palette generator. This isn’t quite as good as Adobe’s one as you can’t refine what it picks but it is nice and easy. Simply upload a photo you’d like to use the colours from and it will give you the hex codes of a full colour palette it has automatically selected for you!
Some tips to picking colours
Pick a wide range of colours for your brand colour palette. I always recommend having some lighter and darker colours (unless you’re doing a rainbow of colours). ie. You could have a light purple, and a darker purple. You want to consider all the different graphics you’ll be creating in the future and give yourself some different options. For example: if you’re designing a Facebook banner and you want to put some text over a dark photo - you might want to use the lighter version of your purple colour! And vice-versa if you’re using a light photo.
When using colour, particularly on text, make sure there is enough CONTRAST between the text and the background. This makes sure that your text will be readable and clear. If you have a dark background, use a lighter colour text! And vice-versa.
If you’d like some feedback on your colours take a screenshot of the palette you’re thinking of using and post it into your Instagram stories and ask your followers if they like it or not with a poll. OR if you’re having trouble deciding - give them two options to vote between.
There’s a few more things I’d love to share but I have to keep something just for my students! 🤫
Comment below which tip helped you the most!
PS. Don’t be afraid of colour. It’s a powerful tool…use it wisely but bravely.