Loryn on Mass Appeal: Build Your Color Palette!
Color plays a huge role in how your brand is perceived, and how your brand is set aside from other like brands. Loryn Engelbrecht, Owner and Creative Director of Loryn Design walked through the importance of a color palette for your brand!
Color plays a large role in how your brand is perceived, it's ability to be recognizable and memorable, and who your brand attracts as clients and customers. The challenge: making your brand color palette feel authentic to you, choosing colors that compliment one another (and don't distract), and having a palette that sets you apart from competitors!
4 Steps to Create Your Color Palette
1. Discover your Color Inspiration!
Create a vision board with Pinterest! If you haven’t created one for your brand, now is the perfect time! Envision your brand in your mind and search for images that encapsulate the feeling you want your brand to give. Chances are you already have a certain color or color family that you want to have in your brand. With those colors in mind, create a board on Pinterest and look for images that incorporate them. Pin images to the board that represent the same look and feel you want your brand to evoke, including landscapes, vector graphics, fonts, quotes, photographs, and objects! After pinning about 30 different images, you’ll more than likely see a trend in the colors you gravitate toward. As you continue to fill up your board with inspirational images, look for color similarities. The patterns that develop will be the images that you use for your vision board! Create a collage (digitally or with printed images) with these images and notice the colors that stand out to you.
2. Choose two dominant colors!
In your vision board, What two colors stand out the most to you? What colors do you LOVE the most? To make your brand authentic, the dominant colors (aka the ones you will use most often in your brand) should be your favorite! The ones that evoke the most happiness! These colors should naturally be throughout your vision board and eventually be present in your logo and future branding!
You usually won’t use every color in your palette for each collateral item, logo variation, or page of your website, so determine which colors will be used most often and which will be used as accents.
3. Choose your accent colors!
When choosing your accent colors, it’s important to keep in mind the color combination possibilities you can have, as each gives off a different vibe for your brand.
Monochromatic: Tints and shades of 1 color
Analogous: Colors near each other on the color wheel
Complimentary: Colors opposite each other on the color wheel
Some combinations add more POP to your brand, while others can offer a more muted, relaxed palette. Choose a palette path that feels most authentic to you, one that you naturally gravitate towards!
4. Pick a light and dark neutral!
Neutrals help balance your color palette. One light and one dark will add contrast and versatility when implanting your brand on marketing materials and your website. Don’t want to use just “black and white”? No problem! Add black to one of the existing colors in your palette, and white to another. You will end up with a darker and lighter version of the color, keeping it neutral!
6 colors will keep your brand materials interesting while all coordinating in the same palette. Your brand may require more or less colors depending on the aesthetic you’re aiming to achieve. However, having intentional dominant, accent, and neutral colors will help you brand stay streamlined and versatile!
Watch my Mass Appeal segment HERE:
http://wwlp.com/2017/11/07/developing-your-brands-color-palette/
