One of the key aspects of establishing your brand identity, the color scheme you choose to represent your company can determine what your customers expect from your business. With this in mind, it’s important to design a logo reflective of your values and choose colors representative of the same to ensure you’re projecting the image you desire.
With that said, here’s how to determine what color your logo should be.
Know Your Customer First
Before you engage in any form of outward communication about your organization, you must get to know your ideal customer. How educated are they? Are they professionals or laborers? What is their income level? How do they perceive themselves? What problem are they coming to you to solve? This will help you determine which colors will be most attractive for your purposes.
What Different Colors Convey
Colors (both primary and secondary) have long been associated with certain concepts and mental states.
Here’s a brief overview:
Red: Strong emotion, passion and intensity, love and hate. The color is known to motivate people to take risks as it intensifies feelings of power, energy, and aggression. It’s evocative of activity, emotion, trust and intensity. Red also decreases analytical thought.
Yellow: Optimism, hope, cheerfulness and warmth are frequently symbolized with this tone. Yellow encourages communication, stimulates the nervous system and is indicative of clarity. The color also reflects youthfulness, personal power, free will and self-esteem. Yellow evokes sensations of joy, life, energy and freshness.
Blue: Coolness, the sea, the sky, calmness and tranquility. Rae often represented in blue. It stimulates trust, security, orderliness and cleanliness. Blue is also known to increase productivity in office spaces. Conducive to communication, truth and self-expression, blue tends to incite comfort, faith, conservation, understanding, and confidence.
Purple: Long considered a regal color, purple has been associated with wealth, success and wisdom. It can also soothe people. Purple has been used to represent creativity and imagination. Additionally, the hue is tied to glamour, power, nostalgia, romance and introspection.
Green: Good luck; nature and health are associated with green. It symbolizes money and new growth, raises moods and promotes images of fertility. Known to relax people, it is also the color to which the human eye is most sensitive. Green evokes feelings of calmness, relaxation, trust, peace and hopefulness.
Orange: Happiness, sunshine and the tropics are frequently symbolized with this color. Reflective of excitement, enthusiasm and warmth, orange is also related to sexuality, creativity and pleasure. The color stimulates sensations of enthusiasm, determination and introspection. It also symbolizes good value.
Black: This color evokes luxury, formality, power, strength and solidity. It is also associated with mystery, magic and the unknown. Black can incite sensations of boldness, seriousness and masculinity.
Colors Tied to Industries
Depending upon the industry in which you’re doing business, certain color trends may dominate your field. As an example, when you design a logo, tech tends to favor blue (think Microsoft), while retail goes with red (like Target) and agriculture (quite naturally—no pun intended) goes with green (such as John Deere).
Variances Among Cultures
You should also consider the brand values you want to convey and be aware that different cultures perceive certain colors in different ways.
While green symbolizes youth, fertility, and new life, it can also represent infidelity. Chinese men avoid green hats, because they indicate their wives have been adulterous.
As you can see, color plays a significant role in both branding and perception. It’s important to keep these concepts in mind when you’re deciding what color your logo should be.
