Decoding Color Theory: Elevate Your Marketing, Web Design, + Branding

If I have these two mugs in front of me, the color highly impacts my instant decision to reach for one over the other. Now imagine this was your brand logo, product or website. Crazy, right? 90% of consumers judge a brand or design just by its color, and 85% pick one brand over the other because of. Well, you guessed it. Color. Picking the wrong color palette is more than just a design faux pas. It might send your customers or audience packing. It's essential to be on top of your color game. Join me as we dive into Color Theory and check out how I use all of this information to start the color palette for my own personal brand. But first things first. Does color really have this persuasive power? Yes. Colors directly impact parts of the brain responsible for releasing a number of hormones through that control many aspects of the body's self regulation such as temperature, sleep, hunger and much more. The impact of color is real, but the traditional understanding of color psychology and marketing that you might have heard before as a simple association of colors to specific emotions for example Blue is calming have been debated and debunked by many studies. And when it comes to picking the colors for your brand, thinking of a consumer's reaction to color appropriateness is far more impactful than the individual color itself. Back to my mug example. Instead of trying to evoke a generic emotion, it's far more impactful to think which color best fit my product. Ultimately, you want to evoke an association between the color and product that feels appropriate to your audience at first glance. But before we start answering those questions, let's dive into Color Theory, a framework that helps us understand and utilize colors effectively. It focuses on the relationships between colors, their impacts, and how they can be combined harmoniously. Let's look at the backbone of Color theory, Color Harmonies. Color harmonies are combinations of colors that work well together and create a sense of balance and unity. Let's go over some common color harmonies Complementary colors opposite of each other on the color wheel. Let's look at a brand that uses this combination. FedEx's color palette uses purple and orange, which are complementary colors. This combination creates a vibrant and dynamic effect, which is an appropriate association with the company's emphasis on speed and reliability in its delivery services. We also have analogous colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel. The Spotify colors feature shades of green, creating a cohesive and visually appealing look. The analogous color scheme contributes to the brand's fresh and modern image. The Instagram logo uses a gradient that transitions from pink to orange to yellow, all analogous colors. This combination creates a warm, vibrant, inviting, instantly recognizable visual identity. Lastly, we have triadic. These colors are evenly spaced around the color wheel. Google colors feature blue, red, yellow, and green, forming a triadic color scheme. When considering the combination of blue, red and yellow, the addition of green, even though not a part of the triadic scheme, enhances the visual interest and creates a distinctive look. The next big piece of color theory is the color Wheel. Color wheel represents the full spectrum of colors and is the foundation of color theory. We have primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, all of which create visual harmony. Primary colors are the most basic colors that cannot be created by mixing other colors. They serve as the foundation for all other colors in the color spectrum. The three primary colors are red, green and blue. Secondary colors are created by mixing equal parts of two primary colors, cyan, green and blue, magenta, red and blue and yellow. Tertiary colors are created by mixing equal parts of primary and adjacent secondary colors on the color wheel. These colors are often considered in between shades, bridging the gap between primary and secondary colors. And colors are also divided into warm and cool tones. Hold on. You may be asking yourself right now, where can I find black and white in the color wheel? Well, you can't. Black and white are not technically considered colors because they don't have a hue. Hue means pure color without any black or white. Black and white, when added to colors, affect its brightness. Adding white will make a brighter tone and adding black will produce a much darker tone. That's very useful, especially as you create the appropriate contrast between colors. Shades of black and white are an essential part of your color palette, and many brands use only black and white in their brand colors. To recap, key elements that can help guide your color decisions are the color wheel, color harmony, and psychology of color. Now it's time to choose the colors for my personal brand and you can follow through and maybe start building a color palette for your business or personal brand as well. But I need to answer some questions before I run to that color wheel. What am I selling as a content creator? I'm selling content to be more specific marketing educational content. Who is my target audience? We can get very specific here, but I'll simplify for this exercise. My target audience are young and mid career marketing professionals at any skill level looking to learn a new tool or technique to improve their work. I'll use Adobe Color for this research. I'll select three brands that align with my target audience and product as a baseline. Domestika, YouTube, and Skillshare. Red is a dominant color in these examples and when thinking of my primary color, I could choose an opposing color to differentiate myself or select a shade of red to stay close to these large brands. You can get much more in depth here, but for now these are the answers I'll use to build my color palette. I'm going to build a simple five color palette using the 603010 rule, which means my primary color is used on 60% of the designs, which and two other colors are used for 30 and 10% and in addition I'll add a shade of white and black to complete the palette. I'll build my color palette on Adobe Color, which is a free tool. I'll click on Create, then Color Wheel. I'll select Custom for the Color wheel settings and I'm going to select HSB for the Color mode. So my color controls will be hue, saturation and brightness. I'll first decide on my primary color. The primary color is the dominant color that sets the overall tone and mood for a design or visual element. This will be the most frequently used color in my brand palette and will be the foundation for all the other colors. I need to choose carefully as it will significantly impact the visual aesthetics and the viewer's perception of the overall design. Because I really want to lean into color appropriateness, I learned from research colors commonly used by media brands and creators. I'll select a shade of red as my primary color to stay close to the colors used by content brands. Now for my secondary colors to distinguish my brand, I'll use a complementary color harmony and use that contrast from opposing colors to differentiate my brand. And another cool thing about this tool is that it already has color harmony settings. Now that I have my primary and secondary colors, I'll adjust the brightness and saturation. As I adjust my colors, I also need to consider color contrast between hues, brightness and saturation. Color contrast highly impacts the accessibility of your website and user experience. A really important step in building your color palette is checking color contrast. So now that I have my color palette's first draft, I'll check for accessibility and Adobe Color has tools for that. First I'll check for color blindness. Great. It's safe for colorblindness. Now I'll check for color contrast. I'll add my shade of white for text and my primary red as background and check so this combination fails for the smaller text. I could use a different color for small text or change my primary color, which is what I'll do. I'll apply the suggestion and change the colors on my palette and adjust my other secondary color so I still have a brighter red, just not as my primary color because it's not a good choice for accessibility. Before I commit to my palette, I'm going to use a free template on Canva to test these colors together in a design. I'll search for content creator templates and select the free filter. I'll use this one. Click on customize and now add my brand colors. So here the primary color will be used as a background and I'll use my shade of white for the main text and my secondary color for the accent graphics. Let me add my picture here and let's see how these colors work together. This is the first draft for the color palette for my personal brand and I think I'm getting somewhere with my brand colors. You'll continue to evolve your color palette, add colors to it, but the first the first step is to start defining the core colors in your palette. Your color palette is just one element of your brand identity. Once you build more of those elements, you can start thinking of your brand style guide next and we have a video to help with that. If you found this video helpful, please give it a thumbs up. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button to stay updated with more branding tips and marketing insights. Share with us down in the comments below what colors you chose for your personal brand and why you made those choices. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next video. I can't find this client info have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot grow better.