Branding Help for newbie Designer - COLOR
Out of context: Reply #4
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- Morning_star1
Firstly, congrats on approaching this in a way that should ultimately build a stronger and more consistent brand. Most projects are started from a final vision and the brand is contrived and manipulated to achieve that one goal, compromising (and weakening) its component parts.
Colour is incredibly important in many different ways. They can evoke a plethora of emotions and expectations, instil values like confidence, health, luxury, budget, male, female etc and drive home a brands presence by becoming an essential brand code.
There are a couple of things you should maybe mull over that could help guide what’s the best solution for your project:
- There’s a big difference between an identity and a brand. Identity is just what it looks and sounds like, Brand is more about what the audience experiences during an interaction with you.
- There’s a battle to be faught between the impact of the brand and the aesthetic you want to achieve. The number of colours you choose is largely unimportant. Brands like Cat, Coke, HSBC, John Deer and Dairy Milk are associated with one predominant colour, a fundamental brand code and in all those examples, just seeing the colour without any other reference can be enough to create instant brand recall in an audience. All these brands have secondary palettes but are only recognised for one
- What is the relationship with the other brand elements? What’s the logo and how much impact should it have? Do the colours help deliver the content or service or muddy the impact and confuse the audience? Do the other brand components: typefaces, icons, tone of voice, images etc come together with the colours to deliver a focussed and cohesive brand experience?
- What’s the fundamental purpose of the brand? Are you selling a physical product? Content? A service? If, as you say, there will be video content, look at brands that do it well and get inspired? Both Netflix and YouTube have incredible simple and pared back colour palettes because their content is what’s important to the audience. In both cases logos are simplified to letters and the brand colours minimised to one and black.
- Less is more. Quite simply the less brand components, including colours, the easier it will be for your audience to recognise and recall your brand amongst all the other noise out there.
Above all consider your audience and what experience you want them to have and how you make it better than everything else out there. Colour is important but only one component and a strong brand. I hope that helps a bit. Good luck and can’t wait to see the final results.