How to Create a Color Palette for Your Business?

By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on March 18th, 2023 9:31 am | 4-min read

Running a business is a very difficult task. It involves a depth that is unfathomable to most people. One of the stalagmites in those unknown depths is a color palette. Let me simplify what I mean.

Out of all the human senses, the easiest to perceive is sight. We have evolved in a way and that gives eyes the most importance among all the senses. Due to this simple conundrum, we have also evolved to subconsciously trust something that looks good.

Hence, how your business appears to the eyes of potential customers and clients is also an important factor in deciding its growth vector. This is the reason why graphic design is such a crucial aspect for making a business successful.

Designing is always a necessary part of business. From the designs of your products to the design of your company blog, all designs have ONE unifying factor. And that unifying factor is Color.

Choosing a color scheme/palette is more difficult than most businessmen assume. In addition, a good color scheme is very important for a business. An improper color palette makes it difficult for your customers to associate with you. Your color palette needs to perform many tasks. It needs to catch the eye of people on the Internet, be pleasant to look at, represent your business, help in branding and determine the colors your business will use for its entire life cycle.

Read on to find out how you can create your business’ color palette.Click on the link if you want to learn the basics of color theory.

Color Associations and Your Brand

Since you know what color theory is, we will now move on to the next part of designing palettes. Color association is a part of color psychology. Research has shown that we tend to associate colors with moods/personality traits. To attract the perfect audience, you need to choose a color that they will associate with. Here are some common colors and the common influence they generate on people:

1. Yellow – lightheartedness, caution, curiosity, joy, instability, warmth.
2. Blue – authority, calmness, dignity, serenity
3. Green – freshness, harmony, health, healing
4. Purple – Royalty, mystery, sophistication
5. Red – aggression, danger, passion, drive

The colors that you will associate with your brand will depend on the audience you’re trying to attract. For example, if your business is a men’s clothing line blue and red will suit your palette very well.

The ‘Hexa-Color’ wheel and Common Business Colors

Business and brand colors should try and emulate a six-color palette or what I like to call it, the hexa-color wheel. Out of these six colors, there are two dominant colors and 4 other colors meant to accent the 2. These 4 can be simple color mixes, shades, tints, tones and so on and so forth.

For a business, it is better to stick to predictable color combinations and use either analogous, complementary or monochromatic color schemes.

Monochromatic palettes are great and provide subtlety and softness. However, they can appear washed out and lack contrast.

Complementary colors are an almost perfect balance of two strong colors and include both warm and cool colors making them catchy. A well-done complementary color palette is also very flexible.

Analogous colors are pleasing to look at and make for a relaxing color scheme. They help achieve a homogenous balance found in monochromatic palettes and the contrast of the complementary. One key complain of analogous colors is that it can get really overwhelming and each dominant color in analogous can end up creating a bad visual design. In simple words, analogous colors can be too ‘busy’.

Commonly speaking, businesses take a dominant color and create a palette by mixing it with white. For online businesses, blue is often the dominant color alongside white.The blue and white palette is of the most common color palettes out there. Popular social media and software companies use a blue and white color palette. Good examples include Facebook, Linkedin, Salesforce, Twitter, WordPress etc.White is –the most accepted among businesses and is almost always the second dominant color for most brands.

How to Create Your Color Palette

Step 1: Decide the dominant colors

Creating your own color wheel begins with choosing the dominant colors. If your business is mainly online, choosing white as one of the dominant colors can be a very good option. On screens, white is very bright and makes it easy to read and interact with a webpage andit is also soothing to look at. If you choose some other color as dominant, make sure that whenever it is used online, using a tint of the color is a good idea.

The second dominant color is based on your brand and what message you’re trying to convey.

If you’re creating an analogous color palette, remember that all colors can count as dominant which is why they are hard to balance.

Step 2: Add accenting colors

Once you’re set on the dominant colors, it is time to start deciding on the colors to support them. For the accenting colors, use tints, tones and shades of a hue to full effect.

If your dominant colors have high contrast, the accenting colors must be washed down versions of them. Both tints and tones serve this purpose to a certain degree. Tints and tones of your main hues are recommended when you’re using analogous and complementary color palettes.

Monochromatic colors require stronger accenting colors and shades of its main color are a great way to bring ‘life’ to them.

Try and make sure that you include both light and dark hues of your dominant colors.

Step 3: Create the ‘hexacolor’ wheel

Create a color wheel of your final colors. Try and make sure you do not use more than six colors in your palette.. If the color wheel shows a gradual and pleasing progression from color to color, you can be sure that your palette has worked out perfectly.

Mistakes to Avoid While Creating a Color Palette

Your first color palette will never be perfect. However, as a rule of thumb, I would suggest creating multiple palettes and testing them out before settling on one. Here’s some more to make sure your color palette is great.

1. Never use shades as backgrounds. Lighter colors in the back are always better. There’s a reason why the second dominant color is usually white.

2. Too much contrast is unpleasant on the eyes. Never use dominant colors together on a big screen. Since both colors are likely warm, they will be uneasy on viewer’s eyes and that may hurt your brand reputation.

3. Blue and White is too common a color scheme. It will not help you stand out and may make your brand ‘boring’ for viewers.

Final Ramblings…

I hope that this blog helped you create the color palette that you were looking for. Good luck and I hope you choose the right colors. Since you already need to start building up your color palette, we welcome you to try Appy Pie’s very own free Color Wheel tool to start experimenting. Here’s a link.