The Importance of Brand Colors

Abbey Pautsch, October 19, 2022

Your brand probably has a signature color. But, to make it a truly powerful brand, you need a palette of colors that complement one another and reinforce the brand’s personality.

The way I see it, design is basically art with rules. It brings creativity and logic together in a balanced and sensible way. In a sense, you can think of brand guidelines as the foundational pillars of the brand. If the foundation is weak, you’re going to have problems in the future.

Therefore, it’s essential to have a thoughtful palette of color options specified in your brand guidelines: a primary color or colors, several secondary colors, and a hierarchy for using them. It promotes consistency and efficiency in the design process. Without those limits, any designer who works on the brand can choose colors on a whim, which inevitably leads to inconsistency across brand materials.

What’s more, I’ve come to appreciate brands with strict color guidelines, because they help streamline decision making for me as a designer. I find it easy to get stuck when choosing colors. Having a well-defined brand palette frees me to make sure the rest of the design looks its best.

Here at McDill, we put a lot of thought into creating color palates that reflect and enhance our clients’ brand personalities. We choose colors relevant to the brand in question, even to the point of assigning names to them that help support the brand’s personality. For example, a purple hue becomes “eggplant” for a produce distributor, and a shade of grey becomes “stainless steel” for an auto manufacturer.

Not only does that help our clients differentiate colors far easier than Pantone numbers or generic names do. It also helps them get past color stereotypes. For instance, a client who doesn’t like brown may just love “mocha.”

So, as you can see, the topic of brand colors isn’t all black and white. Fortunately, McDill can design a powerful and efficient color palette for your brand.