Colour is one of the strongest elements of your visual branding
It’s probably the first thing you see, closely followed by shape. So, not only does your colour palette have to ‘talk’ to your clients and customers – helping them to decide how you make them feel about you, it has to be ‘accessible’ and work across your touchpoints, online and offline.
So, brand colours – how do we choose them? Obviously they need to be ‘apt’ they need to say something about the company – what it does, who they are, what they say, how they ‘fit in’. Once you’ve chosen where it is in the spectrum, blues, greens, reds etc then making the palette can be helped with websites like Coolors where you can build and try out RGB palettes. Bearing in mind if they are ‘accessible’.
So, what exactly is ‘accessible’?
It means choosing high contrast so that anyone who is visually impaired can still get the message – king is of course black and white – low contrast is hard for anyone to see. You’re looking for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 (WCAG 2.1 – a minimum text size of 14pt bold or 18pt in black or white is still readable on the solid colour background to anyone colour blind – about 4.5% of the population). There are websites where you can find accessible colours and make a palette, like Venngage (featured in the image). Check your contrast here.
Google doesn’t punish you, but departing customers will and for larger organisations accessibility – in both colour and text legibility (size and ‘x’ height) is a requirement.
So, what are ‘touchpoints’
These are the places where your brand comes into ‘touch’ – or contact with your clients and customers – that’s anything from a business card to a website. What does that mean for colour choice? Looping back to brand colours and accessibility you may need to review what you’ve chosen online, because what works online doesn’t always work offline, RGB doesn’t print exactly in CMYK (normal print inks) and if you pony-up and use Pantone colours, the chances are slimmer.
Colour consistency
Consistency in visual branding is paramount, and it’s why colours can have their own Pantone formula like the Tiffany blue, or be fought over like the Cadbury purple and view seemlesly across all media. Choosing colours that are the same across all media takes some effort. RGB – online colours use Red Green and Blue – plus the backlight of the monitor make a large colour-gamut available on-screen (factor in – monitors do not display colours the same way). CMYK – offline colours are used on print presses and are made up of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black – factor in how they are affected by paper colour, quality and finish. Pantones are specialist printing inks that use ‘white’ to make pastels, can have a metallic finish, and use base colours like Reflex Blue and Orange 021 that are not easily replicated in both RGB and CMYK, and generally lose their richness and vibrancy when converted, especially into CMYK. They do however give a superior print quality and guaranteed consistency especially in solid ink coverage. There are some colours that are successful across all media so you may never need to actually print with Pantone inks (which is more expensive).
So when looking at brand colours and finding ones that will need to work across all touchpoints – a trick I have for you is to collect up big-brand guidelines where big agencies have painstakingly worked out their palettes and that invariably include Pantone references and RGB/CMYK breakdowns that have been fully tested – then you’ll know they’re a pretty safe choice!
