Brand colour palette

A workable palette has one primary colour, one secondary and three to five neutrals for text and backgrounds. With it come exact values for screen and for print, because the same green looks different on a monitor than on paper, and different again on cardboard than on coated stock. Without those values every supplier guesses, and within a year you have three versions of the same brand.

Why companies underrate it: colour is the first thing recognised at a distance, before anyone reads the name. At a trade fair it decides whether someone finds you from the aisle. A drinks producer who shifted the shade between two packaging runs ended up with two versions of the same product side by side on the shelf, and customers asked which one was older. Reprinting cost more than the packaging design.

How it is built: start with the primary colour and check that a competitor does not already own it. Then test contrast against white and black text, because a beautiful colour you cannot read on is a problem for the website and for accessibility. Finally test it in print, not on a monitor. You say where the brand will appear, and we supply values for each of those uses.

Where it goes wrong: too many colours. A palette with eight equal shades stops working as a recognition cue and materials look random. The second trap is a colour that prints badly, a saturated orange that goes dull on uncoated paper. And mind the symbolism: red means caution in one country and luck in another, which matters for brands heading abroad.

We show every palette printed on three materials: plain paper, cardboard and film. Clients are always surprised by the difference. Try it today: print your logo on an ordinary office printer and hold it up next to your screen.