Colors

What color palette you are using

Color is one of the fastest-working signals in a brand's vocabulary.

Color creates instant emotional and categorical associations, often before someone has processed the shape or words of a brand mark. A palette communicates warmth or coldness, premium or accessible, playful or serious. These associations are partly cultural and partly built over time through consistent use. Once a brand owns a color in a category, that ownership becomes a strategic asset.

The problem with color decisions is that they are often made on aesthetic grounds alone, without thinking about differentiation. In many industries, there are dominant color conventions (blue for finance and tech, green for health and environment) that make standing out or signaling differently require a deliberate choice to break from the norm.

How strong brands handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are approaches and illustrations from how brands tend to work, not rules, and never a ranking of companies.

Category differentiation

Brands like T-Mobile (magenta) and Hermes (orange) have built significant brand equity around colors that set them apart from category norms. Owning an unexpected color can become a major recognition advantage.

Systematic use

Strong brands define primary, secondary, and functional colors with rules for how they relate, rather than picking colors that 'look nice together' without a system.

Contextual flexibility

Brands like Spotify and Google use a flexible color system that allows for vibrancy and variation across contexts while anchoring to recognizable core colors, keeping identity intact.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

What does our current color palette communicate, and is that what we intend?
How does our color choice compare to competitors in our category, and is that intentional?
Do we have clear rules for how and when each color in our palette should be used?
How do our colors perform across different applications, both digital and physical?
Is there a color we could realistically own in our market, and are we investing in owning it?

Things to notice

Choosing colors based on personal preference rather than brand strategy and differentiation is one of the most common early brand mistakes.
A palette that looks harmonious on a mood board may not perform well in every context (print, dark mode, environmental signage).
Color accessibility is often overlooked: insufficient contrast affects a significant portion of users and can signal carelessness.