How to Choose Brand Colors: 5 Questions Before the Palette

Almost every brand project starts the same way. Someone arrives with a reference saved on their phone and says: “I want this green.” Or: “My competitor uses blue, so I don’t want blue.” The conversation has begun with color, and color is the last thing a brand project should decide.

People searching for how to choose brand colors are usually at this point: the business exists, the name exists, and what is missing is whatever will paint everything. The choice looks small and ends up on everything, from the website to the shopfront.

The short answer: brand colors come out of five questions, and none of them is “which color do I like”. Who the brand serves, who it needs to stand apart from, where the colors will appear, whether the palette survives black and white and whether text stays readable on screen. Answer those and the palette almost chooses itself.

Why color comes after strategy

Color on its own says nothing. A gold can mean luxury, tradition or a costume jewelry shop. What gives it meaning is what the company does, who it speaks to and how it wants to be remembered.

That is why, at the studio, the palette is born together with the symbol and the typography, never before them. In our branding process the identity stage brings together symbol, typography, color palette, graphic elements and the first real applications, so you see the brand working before you approve it.

The five questions that decide the palette

1. Who needs to feel welcome?

A clinic speaks to people who are anxious, a law firm to people who want certainty, a café to people who want to stay. The color has to speak to that state of mind, not to the taste of whoever hired us.

2. Who do I need to stand apart from?

Open the websites of five direct competitors and look only at the colors. If four of them use the same family, that family has become the uniform of the sector. Wearing the uniform is not a mistake, but looking like the market is the shortest road to being forgotten.

3. Where will these colors live?

Business cards, shopfront, uniforms, packaging, social posts, website and slide decks. A color that looks beautiful on screen can look dead in print, because screen and paper work with different systems (RGB and CMYK). Think about the hardest piece to reproduce before you fall in love with a color.

4. Does the palette work in black and white?

Print the brand in black and white, or drain the color from your screen. If the logo is still recognizable, the brand is well built. If it only works in color, it will suffer on a stamp, a photocopy, a watermark and an invoice.

5. Is the text readable on top of it?

The W3C accessibility guidelines (WCAG) ask for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 between regular text and its background. Light yellow on white, for example, does not pass. This is not fussiness: it is the difference between the person who reads your price and the person who closes the tab.

How it went in our own work

For the M7 Group identity, a healthcare hub in São Paulo, we faced exactly the problem in question 2. The case study says it plainly: almost every healthcare website picks the same hospital blue and the same photo of a smiling doctor, and looking like everyone else is the fastest way to be remembered by no one.

The brand’s “M7” monogram appears in gold on navy blue on a street poster, and the logotype goes on the reception wall as neon with an orange frame. It is a system that has to work on a wall, a uniform, a video and a screen, which is why the delivery includes positive, negative and outline versions, the clear space and the minimum size. Today the M7 team runs its own social media on top of the system we left standing: the brand stays recognizable in every post.

You can see the pieces one by one in the M7 Group visual identity case study.

How many colors does a brand need?

There is no magic number, but a structure that works for most businesses is this:

• One main color: the one people associate with the brand.
• One or two support colors: for highlights, buttons and backgrounds.
• Neutrals: a dark and a light one for text and breathing room. The brand spends most of its time in them.

More than that and the brand turns into confetti. When one color shows up everywhere, it gets remembered, and that is the palette’s whole job.

What the guidelines must say

Choosing the color is half the work. The other half is writing it down. The brand guidelines we deliver list the palette in CMYK, RGB, HEX and Pantone, the typographic hierarchy and real application examples, so the printer, the social media manager and any other agency use the same shade, not “a similar blue”.

A color without a code becomes interpretation, and the brand drifts a little with every new piece.

Before choosing a color, decide this

Write one sentence about who the brand speaks to and who it needs to stand apart from. With that sentence in hand, the choice stops being taste and becomes a decision.

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The palette is one piece of our branding and visual identity design, which brings together strategy, symbol, colors, typography and guidelines. If your brand needs colors that tell the truth about the business, get a quote in four steps, with no meeting required to start.