Making the Right Color Palette for Your Business Brand

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• Free Resource to Select your Color Palette: Colormind.io
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Putting the Palette Together

If you have a core color in mind to use for your business’s branding, the process doesn’t stop there – you’ll still need to choose how saturated it is, how light or dark it is, and what colors you want to complement it with.

Using our barbershop example, we’ll walk through choosing the core brand color according to our brand’s adjectives, what hue we want, and the tools we can use to find the best colors to tie everything together with.

Making the Right Color Palette for Your Business Brand – Transcript

You don't have to be a graphic designer to get the colors of your website correct. With just the smallest amount of knowledge about color psychology and the right website, you can pick out the perfect colors to complement any project you're working on in no time. 

Hey everybody, Will Scheren here from Small Business Startup Guide by TRUiC. This video is part of a larger course dedicated to helping small business owners cut through the noise and get to the essentials of starting and operating their business. If that sounds like it would be really useful to you, be sure to like and subscribe. 

In the last video, we learned enough about color psychology and color theory to gain an understanding of how the colors that we choose for our brand can affect consumer psychology. In this video, we'll head over to Colormind.io/bootstrap to select a color palette for the imaginary barbershop that we've been building throughout this course. This is my favorite website for selecting color palettes because I think the generator makes good decisions, and every time you generate a new color palette, the site allows you to see how your color choices could look on a website. 

We're going to start by selecting the middle color of the color palette on the top of the screen. This will bring up a color panel. The color panel allows you to adjust the hue of a color on the right-hand side. Start by selecting a hue that aligns with your decision concerning brand personality. If we look back at our adjectives for the barbershop, warmth was the adjective that we assign with the strongest value on our brand personality spectrum. So we'll start by selecting brown as the main color to build our palette around. 

Since brown is essentially a dark orange, we'll start by selecting an orange hue and then move the cursor down the y-axis until we find a dark enough orange to be considered brown. Then we'll move the cursor along the x-axis to select an intensity for that brown that we think we could build a palette around. So there, the color brown that we're going with is #5b2809. 

Then I'm going to click off of the color panel and lock the color into place and click generate. Colormind.io will then provide you with four complementary colors. I like to build a color palette that will provide me with a light accent option to be used to bring attention to design elements by contrasting with the rest of the palette; a dark accent for another accent to be considered; a white or nearly-white color to be used as the background for your dark-on-light designs, or the text color of an inverted design; and a black or nearly-black color to be used as the text color on a black on white design or as the background for inverted designs. 

I'll continue to refresh Colormind.io until it provides me a color palette that meets all of these criteria, being sure to lock in any colors that I want to keep before refreshing the palette generator again. The website will also refresh the colors on the page as well to give you an idea of how the website would look if you were to select the provided color palette. 

It's worth noting that colormind.io does not provide you with any back button to be able to go back and to compare color palettes. So if you find a color you like, be sure to write down the six-digit hex codes for each of the five colors to be able to reference later and compare to other color palette options. 

When you have the color palette you're happy with, take a screenshot or write down the hex code somewhere that you won't lose them and save them to be incorporated into your brand guidelines. 

So there you have it. Now you have your brand colors. In the next video, we're going to use your selected fonts and brand colors to start considering the logo for your business. 

This video is part of a step-by-step course that gives business owners all of the essential information to start and operate their business. We provided a link where you can get access to all of the free and discounted business tools that we mentioned in this course below this video. 

Be sure to like and subscribe to get more of this content. We'll see you in the next video, and if you have any questions, let us know.