color palettes

Choose the best brand color palette for your business with the five free tools in this post.

5 Free Tools for Getting Your Brand Color Palette Right

Ready to create your brand color palette … but not sure where to start?

This article shares five tools you can explore right now. Find the one you enjoy the most and use it to put together a winning color palette for your business.

The best way to harness the power of color in your marketing is to use colors that support and reinforce your brand.

And don’t go color crazy: pick two main colors, and use them consistently in everything you do.

You may not feel “artistic” enough to do this.

You haven’t studied color theory and you don’t need to know all of that anyway. You just want a nice set of colors that will work for your business.

I don’t blame you — color is an essential part of your visual brand.

In this post, I’m going to share my favorite tools for choosing your brand color palette. The right colors for your brand may be just a click away …

Related: Color Confusion Resolved: 5 Techniques for Choosing Great Business Color

Related: The Simplest Way to Choose Your Brand Colors in Just 2 Steps

Read article …

Color Confusion Resolved 5 Techniques for Choosing Great Business Color 1

Color Confusion Resolved: 5 Techniques for Choosing Great Business Color

“What business color should I use?”

It’s one of the most common questions I hear. And I understand why it’s daunting. With millions of available choices, where should you even start?

In today’s post I’m going to share five techniques for choosing business colors, plus a free tool you can use as a reference whenever you need to create a color palette.

Read article …

A man showing his hands

Don’t Do These 5 Dirty Design Deeds

Design is a series of decisions. When you know enough to make good decisions, everything you design looks better. And it’s not hard. Anyone can do it, even you!

Maybe it’s because I’m such a visual person, but I see a lot of really bad design decisions out there. I’m ready to call them what they are: dirty design deeds.

They’re cheap and they’re easy to abuse. You can avoid them once you know what they are.

In recognition of these dirty deeds, I’ve created a Please Stop list. If you’re using these techniques, please stop. Now.

Read article …

A colorful walkway

Business Colors: You Already Know The Most Important Rule

Red and blue. Maroon and white. Green and yellow.

What do your high school, your favorite sports team and most major corporations have in common? Two colors. They pick two main business colors to represent their organization, and you should, too.

It’s all about restraint

When it comes to color, the best policy is to restrain your hues. It sounds counterintuitive, but if you want your business to look good, you should stick to a limited palette of colors.

creating a brand that's recognizable by choosing a two-color palette

There’s a good reason for this. We expect our audience to associate specific images (like our logo and colors) with our business.

The less information we give them to “learn” about us, the better the chance they’ll absorb it.

So stick to what your middle school, high school and college did: pick two colors, and make them your “signature” hues.

Use them consistently in your web and print materials, and make sure any other colors you use are secondary to these two main hues.

Finding colors to work for your business

If you are in the process of defining the colors that will represent your business, there’s a great online (free) resource you can use.

It’s called Paletton.

Paletton website for choosing color palettes

Use the “Hues” tab to select colors. Adjust brightness with the “Adjust Scheme” tab.

You can implement color theory by clicking on the color wheels along the top. Once you have a group of colors you like, try clicking on “Light Page Example” and “Dark Page Example” to see how your colors might look when applied to a real web page. When you’re all done, click the “Export” tab to save your colors to the format you prefer.

Remember, of the group of colors you choose, you should choose and use two main colors.

The others can be used as accents on your web pages or print pieces, but two main colors should dominate. This will make it easier for your customers to remember your business colors.

It will make your job faster, too.

When you have only two colors to choose from, color decisions become a lot easier.