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.

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.

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.