© Anita Gould

The colors you associate with your brand are extremely important.

Even if someone isn’t aware of who you are or what you do, your brand’s essence is conveyed right away by what your colors tell them. Many different feelings are associated with individual colors. Picking the wrong color could turn a customer away before they have the chance to become one.

Coloring Inside The Lines

You have no clue where to begin? Look to your peers already doing business in your sector. Most of the time they’ll already have an idea of what works for their customers as well as their industry.

Sometimes copying a style & color can seem non-innovative. You decide whether or not you should fix it if it’s not broken.

Color Me Emotional

Besides conforming to industry standards, the main reason to use color is to communicate a non-verbal message to your customer. Emotional color conveyance is an art NOT a science. What a particular color means is based on the general consensus of society. One application that is making headway into figuring out what each color means to us is Cymbolism. Cymbolism “attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.”

Cymbolism is a businessman’s best friend when figuring out which colors will best tell your story in branding & marketing. As of today they have a database of 240 words. You can search for specific words or click on specific ones here. Usability Post has an interesting chart of companies, colors and the words associated with them in “A Guide to Choosing Colors for Your Brand“:

Color Overload

So then where DO  you truly begin? Using your competition and generally accepted color-word associations are both good guides but if you don’t know what you stand for- not what you do- then you’ll be lost. Start with Guide: A Brand Strategy Checklist and Is Your Business Communicating The Right Brand Message? These two articles will point you in the direction for finding the values and voice of your brand. Once you have figured out the main keywords associated with your brand- essentially what you stand for- then you can begin to create your ultimate logo.

Don’t be afraid to try out multiple variations. Starbucks has a widely known logo in green and a less well-known one in brown. At first you will come up with a list that reflects a couple of different colors. Ask yourself which ONE WORD do you want to represent your brand visually? Which ONE WORD encapsulates everything that your brand stands for? That’s your color- and incidentally possibly part of your tagline.

Color Me Done

I highly suggest consulting a trained graphic design professional when creating your logo. Nothing says ‘not ready for primetime’ better than a businessman slapping together a hasty logo. I recommend against creating your logo yourself, unless you have a background in graphic design, and even then you should be consulting with another trained professional in order to give you some perspective. Often we are too close to our own work to not be biased.

This is the experimentation portion of building your brand. Feel free to try different things out because once you are “branded” in your customer’s mind that’s mostly the end of the story. The first impression you leave with someone is always a lasting one. Any changes after that point only complement not supplement your brand history.