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How To Choose the RIGHT Colors for Your Logo or Brand (Easy Tutorial For Non Designers) - 2022

Feb 10, 2021


A brand strategy starts with choosing the RIGHT color scheme.


In this easy design tutorial, you’ll learn how to choose brand colors and how to brand consistently for your website and instagram theme.


Whether you’re designing a brand for the first time or rebranding, a strategic color theme is one of the most important pieces of your brand guidelines.


To follow along this tutorial, be sure to check out our *designer-approved* strategy to choose the RIGHT colours for your brand or business to attract your dream clients: https://learn.aligncreativeminds.com/pick-the-right-colors-business


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Vitina Blumenthal (00:00):

If you're struggling with choosing the right colors for your brand, you're definitely going to want to stick around and watch this video. Now, I am sure you are very aware that there are tons of color tutorials out there, but most of them are super advanced and made for people like myself, designers, and not for people like you who don't have hours to learn very complicated and very expensive software.


Vitina (00:27):

That's why I'm going to show you how to create a free brand color palette in under 10 minutes using software that is super easy and perfect for non-designers. But before we get to that, if you are looking for cool hacks and ideas to help you grow your business, please be sure to hit the subscribe and notify buttons now.


Vitina (00:51):

I am Vitina. I am the co-founder of Brand Therapy Sessions and over the last decade of working with one-on-one clients, as well as with our students, solidifying a strategic color palette on your own without the guidance of a designer can be a really hard task. And that's often because I see entrepreneurs make this one mistake all the time when they're going through this process, and we're going to tackle that mistake together today so we make sure that you don't do the same thing as you dive into this process. I'm also going to show you a simple and fun, that might be a little bit biased on my end, I think it's really fun, process to create a beautiful but also strategic color palette for your brand.


Vitina (01:42):

The common mistake I see people make all the time when they're choosing their brand color palette, is that they'll automatically just choose their favorite colors. Please do not do this if you want to create a strategic color palette for your brand. You're going to want to make sure that you have your MVP, your most valuable person in mind. And that person is your ICA, your ideal client avatar, your dream clients, the people that you want to attract to your business so you can actually serve them.


Vitina (02:16):

So you want to make sure you keep them in mind when you're going through this process. Here's something that I think you'll find really interesting is color is the first thing that people will subconsciously notice about your brand and all of your marketing materials. Research shows that 90% of snap judgments are influenced by color alone. 85% of consumers based buying decisions on color and color helps people recognize your brand by up to 80%.


Vitina (02:48):

Now you might be thinking that all of this sounds super complicated, and I promise you, it's not as complicated as you think. All of your color choices really come down to your values and how you want your ICA, that dream client, to feel when they interact with your brand online. Whether that's your website, your social media, whatever medium that is. Because each color subconsciously gives off a different energy and that's something that we're going to cover.


Vitina (03:20):

I created a simple workbook to help you figure out the best color for your brand, the right color for your brand, based on your values. And I put the link to this workbook in the description below. I'm curious to know before you actually dive into the workbook, what color or colors are you considering for your brand? Take a moment, let me know in the comments below, and we'll move over to my computer and I'll show you my simple technique to come up with a beautiful and strategic color palette for your brand.


Vitina (03:57):

All right, we're going to break this down into four easy steps. Step one being discover your color. At this point, if you've gone through the workbook, you should know which color you should be focusing on in terms of your values. But for the sake of this tutorial, let's just say I got the color orange.


Vitina (04:16):

That brings us to step two, exploring pallets. So, the next thing that you'll want to do is actually look for some inspiration. My favorite place to nerd out on color palettes is definitely Pinterest. In the link below this video, as well as in the workbook, you will have access to our color board on Pinterest for some inspiration. So, knowing that my color for this brand is orange, I'm going to go through this board. You can also use the main Pinterest dashboard as well. You don't necessarily have to use our board. And you can just type in orange color palette and tons of inspiration will come up for you. Or even if you have a favorite photo, don't opt out of that. That's something that you could also pull inspiration from as well.


Vitina (05:11):

So, let's go through this and keep in mind that I'm looking for orange as my primary color. So, as long as orange is in the palette, I can use the rest of the colors as more supporting colors. So, don't worry if you look at say this palette and I see orange and there's also some brown and gray and off-white. So, I can still use this palette because there is orange in it. But as you're probably going to start to see, each pallet gives off a little bit of a different essence.


Vitina (05:43):

So, I'm going to go in and I'm going to select, let's say, three to five pallets to use. So, here's one pallet here. I love this. It has more of this burnt orange look with supporting colors of yellow, green. It's super earthy. So, I'm going to use this. So, I'll click on the actual image. I'll right click on the image and I'll click on "Save image as." You'll go in here and you'll change this to color palette number one. And then you'll click save. And then you'll go back and you'll continue going through. So go through, find about three to five pallets either on our Pinterest board or on the main Pinterest site. Search for something that really speaks to you.


Vitina (06:45):

Step three is social validation. So, once you have these three to five palette choices saved, I highly recommend sending your top choices to your friends or bonus points if you send them to your ideal client for feedback. I have no doubt you have amazing taste, but getting this live feedback from the people you actually want to attract is going to help you with choosing the right colors for your brand. I did include a short email template in the workbook that you can copy and paste and send to your clients or potential clients or your friends for this feedback.


Vitina (07:28):

The last and final step: Solidifying your colors. So, I'm going to show you how to get the color codes to use for your brand palette. There are many tools out there that you can use. For the sake of this tutorial, I'm going to use Canva's color palette generator. It's a great tool for non designers. My other favorite tool is coolers.co. I'm going to leave both of those links in the description below as well as in the workbook.


Vitina (08:01):

So, based on your research in your step three, and talking to real ICAs and friends, depending on what their favorite was overall, if you had multiple votes for one color palette, I'd recommend using that. So, based on your feedback, you're going to go in, you're going to upload an image, and let's just say it was color palette number three. I'm going to select that and I'm going to click on open. So, within a matter of seconds, Canva will go in and create the swatches based on that palette.


Vitina (08:39):

So, right now I have four color options. This is great. And you can see that Canva actually puts the color code below each of the swatches and simply you can just copy and paste. So, you can put this in a document. I did include a link to an actual template that you can customize for your brand. So, it is a Canva template. It's in the workbook and this is what it looks like. You can go in here and you can update to your brand name. Let's just say it's Vitina, I'm just going to use my name. And then on page two, I'm going to go in here. I'll put my name in here again.


Vitina (09:28):

And then now I'm going to replace these four swatches. So, strategically I did put them in order from darkest to lightest. You don't necessarily have to use that as a rule of thumb, but this is the way I usually like to organize color. So, what I'm going to do is go back to this color palette generator, and I'm going to get this first swatch, which seems to be the lightest. So, I'm going to copy that. I'm going to go back in here. And I'm going to add this code after the word hex. And then here, I'm going to click on the actual swatch and in the top left corner, you'll see the gray color. Click on that. You're going to click on this rainbow new color and you're going to copy and paste that right code in there.


Vitina (10:20):

So, there is color number one. Now I'm going to go for the next lightest. So, muddy waters is the name of this. So, we'll select that. We'll add the hex code first. Paste that in there. The easy way to do that is Command-V on a Mac. And we'll add a new color in here. Great. Let's go back to the generator. I'm going to grab this next color, russet. And if you wanted to go a little bit deeper, you could add those fancy color names underneath the hex code. It's totally up to you. But if you're going to do it for one of them, do it for all of them. And then this last color right there.


Vitina (11:40):

It's super important to remember to remain consistent. The whole idea of having these in your toolbox is it makes it so much easier to make choices when you're doing any design. And this will keep consistency. Remember, going back to the stats on the research of color and people recognizing your brand by up to 80% because of the colors that you actually use.


Vitina (12:11):

And again, to be able to access this template, you'll be able to access it from the workbook. It's in the description below. And if you want to learn more and go deeper, we'll be making more videos on creation of color palettes in the future.


Vitina (12:24):

Okay, I know you just learned a lot. But please remember, I created that step by step workbook to help you create your color palette. And I included the link in the description below and it'll help make your research ridiculously easy and fast and you'll get the right colors for your brand on the first try. Now, if you liked this video, could you please do me a huge favor and hit the subscribe button below? We are a brand new channel and this will really help us grow our channel and help us reach the people that we're meant to serve. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll see you next time.



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