How to Create Your Brand Color Palette

No matter what stage of business you are in, creating a color palette for your brand is incredibly important.  It provides consistency, creates the overall aesthetic, and also creates brand recognition for your audience. Choosing a color palette can definitely be tricky, especially if have no idea where to start.  This is one area in the brand design process that I truly love and look forward to with each branding project.  My hope is that by sharing some of the things that I consider & look for while creating color palettes that it will help you on your color palette journey.

How to Create Your Brand Color Palette

1. Create a List of Words.   Create a list of 5-10 words that describe your brand’s personality and/or aesthetic.  This forces you to sit down and dig into your brand identity and will help provide you with an overall look and feel of your brand.  If you are unsure where to start I recommend doing a brain dump of words that come to your mind when thinking about your business, your goals, and your ideal client.
2. Preferences & Goals.  Sometimes these may not always align with each other, so it’s important to find a way to blend the two together seamlessly.  Some things to consider include:  Who are you trying to attract?  What color palettes are your ideal client attracted to?  What feelings do you want to portray?
   While you are doing this, keep your own preferences in mind.  We are all drawn to certain colors, textures, and patterns.  These are usually an indication of what makes you unique and what inspires you.  So while your ideal client may be feminine, and many of the brands that they love include the color pink – it does not mean that you need to use pink in your palette if you hate the color.  There are other colors that you can use that are just as feminine and delicate, such as lavender or a light blue.
3. Inspiration Board.  I also have my clients create an inspiration board on Pinterest.  This is an incredible way to visualize what you have in mind for your brand – from your colors, textures, typography, and the overall impression that you want for your brand.  The key here though is to pin with intention and purpose.  Include images that draw you in and make you think of your business and your ideal client when you look at it.  The more images that you can pin the better – I’d say at least 20-30 pins is a great start.
4. Create a Final Color Palette.  Use those images that you pinned to create your final color palette.  You can do this through a few different methods.  To create a mood board I use PhotoShop,  but you can also use Illustrator or Canva.  If you are unsure how to create a mood board check out an older post of mine Create a Mood Board.
   However, if you are not a designer or are not familiar with these programs there a variety of tools out there to help you create a color palette.  Coolors, Adobe Colors, Canva Color Palette Generator, Colormind, and Palette Fx. These resources will help you create a beautiful color palette.  For most of them, you just need to upload an image and it will pull out a variety of color palettes from that image for you.

You can see that creating a color palette is a combination of many things to consider.  What questions do you have about choosing a color palette for your brand?  Share in the comments below.