Choosing colours for your brand - 4 Non Textbook Strategies

As a creative professional, choosing colors is one of the major skill which inherently a designer needs to have. Whether the recruiters or design consulting or startups or anywhere, if you go for interview or showcase your project, or if you wanted to become a freelancer or anything, your color sense is very important. Jagdish, do I need to have a very special sensory item in my brain or something to become a color expert? No, guys, absolutely. It's a learnable skill. As simple as learning a driving, swimming. This is a learnable skill. See, color is a very deep topic. In fact, it takes hours and hours of time to learn, and particularly hours and hours of time to practice, hours of time to get feedback, reflect and do it. Absolutely. I cannot cover everything in this podcast because it's a very short one. Okay? But I'll give you an importance of why it is vital. See, guys, as a human evolutionary trait, we have evolved by mating ourselves with different humans, okay? Like let's say a plant, they mate asexually. Nature has evolved in a way by reproduction and procreation, right? One of the major perspectives which I can say it happened is because of colors is because of the attractiveness what we have. See, basically colors is actually a different spectrum and the wavelength of the light which is falling in a different wavelength, right? We all know that, starting from white to highest wavelength color, red and everything. So everything has a different, different. What do you call everything has a different, different wavelength, okay? We all perceive through that, when it comes to that, the absence of the light is actually called darkness. It's completely black, pitch black. So to understand color in a basic sense. See, I'm not taking a textbook approach here. I'm just giving you the understanding of why color is important evolutionary wise. Okay? So now I'll tell you how you can improve that particular aspect as a designer and how you can choose certain colors for your brand. Okay? The very first thing, what I'll tell you is first, your intuition is a big judge here, okay? There is no particular proven formula or something for choosing colors. First of all, if you are associating with the brand or if you are associating with your client project, or if you are thinking about what you wanted to bring the value for your customer through your design, think through that story narrative. Your intuition is a very first judge for choosing colors for your brand or your project or anything. The second important thing is understand and really create a very good sense of a story narrative for your customer or your projects or your freelancing work, okay? Write a story about it. Make A feel of what your customer really wants to feel. Think through from your customer point of view, what is the real objective this product or service is doing and what problem you're trying to solve. If you think about that now, you can come back to your reality and think how this color can augment that experience. See, I'm just giving you a relevant statement now, okay? I'm not asking you to do a UX research here. That's okay. You can do a UX research, after which only you'll be doing your product design and everything and iteration and ideation and sketch and prototype wireframes, right? But assuming you have done your user research properly, but with respect to color, you need to do another research, form a story narrative, think through your user perspective in order for your product and service to go and solve their problem. What colors you can really make it augmented. Hey Jagdish, you're talking about solution giving, but you're talking about colors. How it is relevant, it is definitely relatable. Guys, I'll tell you. See guys, when you wanted to take a example like let's say sofa, okay, maybe if you're designing a physical product, if you're designing a furniture like a sofa, okay, so you're targeting an audience which is like a kids, they want a playful design. They want something like a, which looks like a kid sofa so that they're encouraged to go and sit there. Okay, that's your story narrative. So now write a story. Okay, my kid is the age of five to seven and he's a very trendy and flashy kid. And he wants to really come into a state that he want to show his friends that he has a new sofa. And he wants to play with his friends by jumping into the sofa using the soft feel, what it has. And he wants to be really comfortable and happy sitting and writing his homework, sitting and writing his particular favorite books or sleeping night in that couch or maybe showcasing to his friends. So that's the kind of story narrative which you want to build for your product. Okay, so imagine this, okay, I'll tell you guys how color is relevant here. When you imagine through this you have a story narrative. Now you have a user Persona, very clear. Now you have the objective which is going to get solved, which is like he wants to write a homework, he wants to sleep in that, he wants to sit in that, he wants to showcase his friends. So now think about the keywords, what you have like let's say pride, okay? And assignment. That's a keyword, okay, Completing the work Sleeping. So this is activities which is doing. Right. I'm just converting that into your keywords. So associate colors, which shows pride. I'll say in my context, pride means red. Okay. Pride means like let's say blue or royal blue. I would say indigo blue. I would say purple. It's a royal. And richness. So pride is something which I associate in that way. Okay, see, if you don't have keyword, if you don't have story, narrative, if you don't have user Persona, it is blind to choose colors, guys, based on your randomness. That's absolutely stupidity. Okay, A lot of people choose like, see, intuition is good. I said it in the first step. You can do it. But if you do it in a more logical way in this sense, you will get more relevant colors. That's why I told you solving a problem is very relevant to colors first. Okay, so think through it. The third important aspect, which I'll say is do a competitive study. Okay, See, this is how you also understand what is the relevance which market is giving. See, your competitor might be 100 years old or 70 years old. He would have did a lot of studies like you. Right? Respect that. Try to understand why particular brands are in this color. Like let's say you can see airlines and hospital industries are mostly in blue colors. Okay? You can see a vibrant fitness equipment. And all these things will be in orange, yellow colors. Okay? You can see love, romance, and all these things will be in pink and like little red and all these things, okay, you can see like let's say a luminescent brand, like let's say sports brand or anything like that, which will be in like green, luminescent colors, red, luminescent colors. So certain brands have that perception already built to it. So how you can leverage that now you put your angle and think through it, okay? Don't just copy what competitors is doing. Try to fit to your context. See how you wanted to really learn and grow in it. Okay? The fourth important thing is understand what is mean by primary colors? What is mean by secondary colors? What does mean by tertiary colors? What is mean by accent colors? How do you really complement the colors? Okay, the complement colors is like let's say if you use a light color, dark color will be a complement. If you use dark color, light color will be a complement. See, there are different, different colors you can take combination of. Absolutely. It's not, it's. It's very difficult for explaining it in the podcast, but I'm just giving you a keyword. Okay, so complementing colors Will be like helping you. Like let's say if you're having a dark background in your product, like let's say in your website, it's good to have a light back, light foreground as a text, right? If you're having light background, having dark text in your foreground is ideally suitable. That's how the visibility gets better, legibility gets better, functionality is getting solved. See, if you're solving the problem automatically, you will see colors fitting to your needs. See, this is how colors can be figured it out. See, you can refer to lot of color templates, charts saying, hey, red means romance in some culture, Red means danger. Red means traffic light. Green means good signal, Green means mental illness, right? Lot of people in the mental hospital, they have green color, right? So we cannot really make a subjective, tabular, column formulated way of seeing colors. Guys, it's definitely subjective for sure, but there is some kind of a universality. I'll tell you brown color. Okay, I'll give you a real time case study. See, we have lot of sensual appeal. See, lot of sexual appeal when we see brown color. Okay? See, our skin is brown. You know why chocolates are brown in color? Have you ever wondered majority of the chocolates, I'm saying, okay, there are some chocolate which is red in color, white. That's okay. Have you ever wondered, have you ever wondered why coffee is brown in color? See, coffee can also be white, red, pink, blue. Think through it, guys. See, sexually, we feel more attracted when we see the brown color because our skin is brown. Right? We've evolutionarily imbibed in our subconscious brain and encoded it in our DNA that brown is more appealing for us. See, I'm just telling you what is our evolutionary trait. Okay, again, there is a lot of studies which is disproving. Lot of studies which I've seen which is proving it. Okay, that's why I'm telling you. But to my knowledge, I have not seen much disproving. I've seen lot of proving studies to it. So one of my faculties were also told this case studies. And you can also think why our skin is really brown. Why our particular chocolate companies are using brown as a color. Why certain, particularly why certain coffee is really brown in that particular flagrant. See, it's very easy for a manufacturer to add a color ingredient, right? So why it is brown? So think through it. Colors is not just choosing randomly. It all comes from your intuition. It all comes from the story, narrative, what you have. It all comes from understanding your competitors. Also it comes from your own basics, understanding of what is primary colors, secondary colors, tertiary colors, complementary colors, accent colors and how you effectively use for your own brand. If you follow those four strategies what I told you guys, definitely you will be having a greater sense of color knowledge. Okay Jagdish, what about Pantone colors? What about ral colors? Where do I learn split colors? That's okay guys, just chill. Okay? Just understand what is the basics first think through this particular thing. This is good for you to digest if you are someone who doesn't know what is mean by colors or if you're not extensively used it. But if you need a great deep study in it. I take three to four hours of a deep master class on what is mean by colors and I give a lot of activities for students to really differentiate and choose colors on applying it in their projects. And I consciously give a lot of feedback from their portfolio also to reflect that colors what they are imbibing as their values into their portfolio and their resume as a color. So that's a deep subject. If you wanted to go really deep, you can come into my mentorship program where I can teach you lot more stuff like this. Color composition, design skills, basic sketching, rendering and all these things. You can send an email to DFC Design for changemail.com I'll be more than happy to help you out but for now this is enough guys. Okay? So thank you so much guys. I hope this podcast would have given you clarity on the colors and if you find this useful, give me a best star rating in Apple and Spotify and you can subscribe to further episodes for notified and thank you so much guys. All the best. Bye bye. Take care. See you.