Stop picking your industry colour

Most brands appear to inherit a colour from their business category rather than choosing one themselves.

It’s an endless ocean of tech companies in a ‘trustworthy’ blue, wellness in a ‘calming’ sage green, consultants in a ‘reassuring’ navy.

I’m seeing an increase in clients coming to me with a preferred colour choice, wanting to follow the same ‘colour psychology’ formula that’s posted everywhere. But in a world where every industry is saturated, why is everyone wanting to simply blend in?

Colour psychology isn’t the full picture

Colour psychology has fell victim to being a top AI topic. And by that I mean an enormous number of creatives are using ChatGPT to come up with blog ideas or social media post ideas, AI is suggesting ‘colour theory’, and then writing the most bland and incomplete overview of the psychology to ever exist.

But if you actually look into the research, colour psychology has never been about ‘you must use a dark blue colour if you want to feel professional’. Thankfully really. Because as we are beginning to see, every service providers primary colour being navy blue is boring.

Instead, real research tells us that there’s so many nuances to our brand colour selections. Context, culture, application, your target customer. White is often signalled as purity in Western settings but viewed as a colour of mourning across Asia as a basic example.

When choosing the colours for your brand the question to ask isn’t what does this colour ‘mean’. Because colour meaning is very subjective to all those nuances.

Instead you need to look at your strategy. Who you’re designing for, what moment are they in, what backdrop will your brand be displayed against?

It’s not just one question, but for a decision as big as your brand colours, why should it be?

More and more brands are falling victim to the colour psychology wheel.

You surely want to be distinctive?

Brands shouldn’t exist to conform. Because if you’re conforming then you have no reason for the business to exist. The best brand colours work when your market learns to relate them to you.

One opinion I love is from Jenni Romaniuk, who’s a marketing science. They talk about how you should build assets that are both famous and unique in your competitive set, showing them consistently until they become shortcuts in people’s heads.

There’s so many brands who do this well. Think about:

Tiffany Blue. Their colour is a legally protected asset used on their boxes and bags since 1998 (Tiffany). Most people who think to start a jewellery business wouldn’t be thinking about a turquoise blue. After all, this colour is a “refreshing, soothing, and energising colour” – not the sort of emotion you want people to feel from a mid-market jewellery brand (turquoise meaning).

Tiffany Blue. #81D8D0.

T-Mobile’s bright pink. Another example of a trademarked colour (where they’ve won injunctions against people branding too similar). Magneta “helps to create harmony and balance in every aspect of life” (the colour magneta). Is this what T-Mobile’s founders wanted to achieve when setting up a new mobile network? Of course not. They wanted to stand out.

T-Mobile Pink. #E20074.

Monzo’s coral. Monzo is perhaps most known for their bright coral shade (which they failed to trademark unlike my other examples), but use primarily all really bright, very un-traditionally ‘finance’ shades in their branding (they had a makeover in 2022 to add more). The meaning behind their coral shade is supposedly “warmth, joy, and sociability” (mobbin). There’s no doubt that the noe-banks are doing a better job of the joy element of banking than traditional high street competitors, but how much joy can banking really contain? So again, Monzo has just done a really good job of using different colours from their market to stand out.

Monzo Coral. #FF4F40.

What do these examples all have in common? They’ve earned their meaning through use. Now, at least to me, a Tiffany Blue box suggests something precious. A bright pink capital T instantly makes me think of T-Mobile. And the use of coral, and other bright shades, makes me associate Monzo with as close to joy as one can get through banking. I’m pretty sure none of their design teams presented the colour psychology behind their proposals as a key reasoning for their colour choice.

Your colour ultimately has a job to do

As much as it would be great for colour to only be about dressing up your brand, your primary colour in particular has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Perhaps one of the most important questions to ask (especially coming from a web designer), is if it will work in your UI. Which means checking if it’s accessible when paired with your primary background and text colour.

WCAG 2.2 sets minimum contrast rations 4:5:1 for regular text and 3:1 for large text. If your primary brand colour can’t hit those thresholds when used on backgrounds or as text, it can’t be a primary colour.

T-Mobile is, in this case, an example of what NOT to do. Their famous pink shade is not accessible when used with a white background. Despite them using it as a text colour, hyperlink colour, and combination in their logo. With only a 4.26 contrast rating (you need a 7 to pass AAA guidelines), this fails our accessibility test.

(I use colour contrast to check)

Apparently their new magneta is “an entirely new color unseen by the human eye… until now”, and accessibility is the top reason why it maybe shouldn’t have been that way (their new shade).

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So how do you choose the right colour?

For starters, I don’t believe there’s any ‘right’ colour. The right colour for you setting up a business will likely be entirely different to the right colour for someone else setting up that exact same business. Your personality, location, target customer, and more will all play into making that decision. But here’s three thoughts to get you started:

Map your category

You don’t want to copy your competitors, but you need to be aware of what’s out there. Have a look at a broad range of people in your field and build a sort of colour histogram. What colours are dominating? Where are their gaps? The aim isn’t to be different for its own sake, but you want to find the sweet spot of where a colour can be recognisably you. So it’s of course fine to pick a shade that others are using, but what’s your twist on this? Do you have a different palette of secondary shades that help you to stand out? Or different application?

Think about where your brand shows up

You might have a primary colour that’s only used in particular instances. For example, Monzos’ famous coral shade is primarily used on their debit cards to make these really stand out against competitors. But on their website, Monzo doesn’t go too heavily on the coral shade and uses their supporting colours instead. As Jenni Romaniuk says, “if you want the branding to stand out, choose and execute for contrast against the visual and audio environment in which it is placed” (Romaniuk). Monzos coral really stands out against the other darker, plain colours of cards people traditionally have in their wallets. So what’s your equivalent?

Design a system of colours

Personally, I never design visual identities with just one primary colour and one background/ text colour. You’ll likely have a whole palette. So don’t think about your core colour as a swatch in silo. Really review this alongside your other shades, understanding what the compatible combinations in both appearance and accessibility are. And giving yourself space to understand what jobs different colours might have, and if they’d work for that role (for example backgrounds vs links vs buttons when thinking about your website).

The point

Let’s stop resorting to ‘colour psychology’ as the underlining decision maker for picking our brand colours. Think about the actual use of your product, the actual goal of your brand, and the actual people who you want to interact with it. The brands that have the most effective colour choices are the ones who defined the meaning of their colour choice, and not the other way round.

So put that colour wheel away and ask yourself what do you want people to recognise, recall, and trust every time they see you?

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