The formula for creating your own color palette for your brand.

If you’re not a brand strategist, but you want to develop your own brand, you’ll need to start with the basics. When developing your own branding you want to start with the basics before you get specific. This is why I’m going to be showing you how to create your color palette. A color palette will help you be consistent and start building the know, like, and trust factors with your audience.

Your brand’s color palette is not just colors you like.

When you start to think about your colors, you’ll want to brainstorm descriptive characteristics. What is your brand? Do you think of your brand as stylish and sassy? Or is it strong and sophisticated? Let’s start by taking a look at some examples.

A business coach named Marie K. wants to ooze confidence in her brand. She chooses her three adjectives: professional, modern, and confident. Using earthy tones and pairing it with a bright color feels very professional but stands out. For this specific color palette, I chose earthy tones with a bright color to make the brand stand out. Those colors were earthy reds, a deep green, and then a light green to help Marie K. stand out in her niche. That’s really important when you’re thinking about your colors. 

How will you stand out in your niche?

A product photographer named Jaz Y. is happy and bubbly. She uses plenty of light and color in her photography. Jaz gives her brand the adjectives: young, friendly, and energetic. She wants to reach young, female entrepreneurs that own young product based businesses. Jaz Y. is a very energetic person and she wants her brand to emulate that feeling.

She chooses bright colors with neutral tones. This gives off exciting vibes but is still cohesive and not too overwhelming. It’s important to have a balance in your color palette. If you don’t have that balance, your brand’s visuals can look off key and unprofessional. The bright colors we chose are a burnt orange and a bright pink. Then a light green and light grey to balance out the bright colors. Neutral tones usually bring color palettes all together to create a balance.

This brings us to my simple formula for developing your brand’s color palette.

The formula

1. Brainstorm

Make a list of as many adjectives you can think of that describe your brand. Aim for 10-20 adjectives, don’t go overboard because we’ll refine them in later steps.

2. Do your research & dig deeper

Duplicate your list of adjectives so you have 3 lists. Then start your research. When you’re thinking about your own brand, you need to think about who your ideal client is and what they relate to. What adjectives really resonate with your audience? What adjectives give off a feeling that you want your ideal client to experience when they see your brand? How would you describe your ideal client avatar? Do they resonate with clean, minimal graphics that emulate professionalism and style? Or do they vibe with feminine, bubbly visuals that make them feel happy and warm inside? Think about these questions and cross off anything on your first list that isn’t in line with your ideal client.

On your second list, you’ll want to think about your competitors. Look at others that are either in your industry, or others that are providing similar products or services. If they’re attracting YOUR ideal client then you’ll want to see what they’re doing right, and what you can do even better. Circle the characteristics that are similar to your competitors.

Finally, you’ll use the last list to compare your first two lists. What’s similar? What’s different? And do those characteristics work well together? 

Now think about who you are as a person. If you are a solo entrepreneur or you are the center of your brand, you’ll want to think about who you are and what you can bring to the table. Do any of the adjectives on your lists embody who you are as a person? Prioritize those characteristics then narrow down your list to 3-5 adjectives based on everything you’ve learned. These will be the characteristics we will use to figure out what your color palette will be.

3. Idea generation

Now that you have your adjectives that you associate with your brand, you can start generating ideas for your colors.

I suggest you start by using color theory to develop at least a couple of colors for your brand. Every color evokes a feeling, so if you want to create a certain feeling for your ideal client, you’ll want to capture that feeling with the colors you choose for your brand.

For instance, the color red is associated with anger, passion, love, and energy. So brands with the color red are typically vibrant and bold, which helps them to stand out. On the other end of the color wheel we have green is known to be trustworthy, intelligent, and natural. Your company could use this color if trust is a huge factor in your brand or if you are an environmental brand.

Color theory is important, but it’s only the starting point to thinking about the colors of your brand. Don’t worry too much about if your brand’s colors are aligned with color theory. If you want to think about color theory, I would suggest doing a little more research on what colors give off a particular mood or feeling.

Now take a step back and look at your adjectives as a whole. What colors do they feel like. For example, funny quirky and creative feel like mint green, bubblegum pink and bright yellow. Think about what they feel like and choose 3-5 colors to go with your adjectives.

Then, bring it back to your industry and your ideal client. Do other people in your industry use these colors? Why or why not? If these colors are too different is it because nobody has dared to be different in your industry or is it because those colors aren’t suitable for your ideal client? Evaluate the colors you chose and change the colors that don’t work accordingly, or choose some other color combinations. Play around with your color combinations. What feels right? At this point, you should be on the right track to your color palette. Keep plugging in colors to replace those that don’t work until you’ve come up with something that you think feels right.

4. Refine your colors

The last step is to tweak your color palette. You need to make sure your color palette is balanced before you can move on. You won’t want to choose the first color that pops up onto your screen because it won’t necessarily work with your other colors. Let’s say you chose a purple, orange, red, and a neutral brown. A deep purple is going to be completely different then a neon purple, so you’ll have to try all the different types of purple to choose the right one that works with your other colors. And then you’ll repeat that with your other colors until your palette feels completely balanced. It’s all by eye so if you don’t consider yourself to be a “creative” this might be the most difficult part of choosing your color palette. But I believe in you — you can do it!

Try it out for yourself!

To create your color palette, you can visit color.adobe.com. Here you’ll find a color wheel with endless possibilities. On the sidebar, hit custom and you can start building your own color palette! You’ll want to either screenshot your color palette when you’re done or you can write down the hex codes for those colors. Use those colors to translate them to the programs you, your team member, or your designer uses to create visuals for your brand. The hex codes are # followed by a 6 character combination of letters and/or numbers (i.e. #EAACAC)

Once you have your colors, you can start thinking about what kind of graphics you want to use. What forms, lines, shapes, images work well with those colors? What can enhance your brand even more?

You can always get the opinion of a brand strategist or designer to help you out (my DMs are always open).