What Your Logo Colors Say About Your Brand

What Your Logo Colors Say About Your Brand

Choosing The best colors for the logo of your brand is a task that makes as much of a difference as choosing the right name does. Your choice of color here can make a significant difference to the success of your brand in the years to come. Even so, it is easy for many business owners to overlook its importance when creating their brand identity.

In reality, a company’s logo is actually the first thing customers tend to imagine when thinking of a brand. In doing so, the colors of the logo can influence people’s emotions and either encourage them to associate with your brand or not. In fact, the use of certain colors could actually greatly increase the success of your branding and marketing campaigns.

To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at some popular company logos and the colors they use:

Hidden Importance of Famous Logo Colors

Green – Green is used by companies such as Animal Planet, Starbucks, and Spotify.

Yellow – There are many fans of yellow in the food industry such as McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC.

Red – A ton of brands use red in their logos such as YouTube, Canon, H&M, and Puma.

Pink – Pink is another favorite of the food industry and is used by brands such as Baskin Robin’s and DUNKIN’ DONUTS.

Purple – Purple is favored by companies such as Cadbury, Wonka, MONSTER, and twitch.

Blue - Blue is often favored by the tech industry and can be seen in the logos of various companies like Twitter, Dell, hp, Skype, and Facebook.

Many business owners tend to demand or reject specific colors based on irrelevant reasons, which can prevent them from having the best logo they can have. It is important to educate oneself on the importance of using various colors based on their cultural associations and other factors contributing to the brand’s success. After all, the purpose of the logo is to impress your audience and not just you.

The color of your logo will help determine the associations your audiences make with your company. Therefore, it is a lot more complicated than just choosing new paint for your kitchen. However, before dwelling into the details of the intricate science of colors and their psychological relations, it is important to learn how cognition works.

Understanding the Psychology of Colors in Logo Designing

Understanding the actual sequence of colors in the way the brain tends to perceive them is an especially helpful step in trying to choose the right color for your logo. The first thing to remember is that color is understood by the brain before images or text. In fact, it comes second in our cognition – right after the shape. This simply implies that color is a lot more important than even the content that goes into the design. Taking this into account can make a positive impact on the branding and marketing campaigns of your business. Now, let’s take a look at some popular logo colors and what they represent.

What the Color of the Logo Says About the Business

Color is A very important factor to consider when deciding your brand identity. Since the colors can severely impact the emotional state of your brand, it makes a big association with the way your brain can associate with a particular brand. This can be easily understood by looking at some of the most popular colors and the emotions they induce in the brain of onlookers:

Red – Power, Energy, Passion, Love, Aggression, Danger

Yellow – Optimism, Hope, Cheerful, Warmth, Happiness, Positivity

Blue – Trust, Security, Order, Cleanliness, Strength, Reliability

Orange – Energy, Balance, Warmth, Creativity, Cheerfulness, Enthusiasm

Green – Nature, Health, Good Luck, Fertility, Finances, Eco-Friendly

Purple – Spirituality, Mystery, Royalty, Sophistication, Femininity, Glamorousness

These common interpretations of colors can help you to understand the way the color palette of your logo needs to be organized to evoke the emotions you deem fit for this job. An ideal situation for this would be to own color in your industry, however, it requires an enormous amount of expenditure on the marketing of it.

How to Choose a Color Scheme for Your Logo

Some of the biggest brands choose their colors after a ton of thought into the decision. This effect can be easily observed when you take a look at the brand’s products in its color without the logo is present at all. You will still be able to recognize the brand just from the color on the product itself. This is what the influence of color really is. In fact, brands can even trigger the same reactions as religions can upon being viewed. This was recently verified by Dr. Gemma Calvert.

The Psychology of Color in Branding and Marketing

Color can make a big emotional impact on how it can make consumers feel upon looking at the logo and other branding elements that are in the same color. On a more practical level, color can also help you stand out in your industry.

When you see a glass with a black fizzy drink in front of a red background, you would obviously know that it is Coca Cola and not Pepsi. This is what can help you stand out in your industry as well. Since branding and color of a logo are so closely intertwined, it can help you to convey a large message instantaneously without the use of words. Color is the key weapon of some of the most recognizable brands in the world since they rely on it for their instant recognition. Since you probably already know the importance of the color of your brand, you can begin to focus on choosing the ideal color.

How to Find the Best Color for Your Logo

Before dwelling into color theory, it is important to first do a crash course in defining colors. This means:

Hue - The actual color

Saturation – The amount of greyness in a color’s shade

Brightness – The amount of black or white mixed in the color

Now, choosing the right color of the brand color requires an understanding of color theory. This explains how color is actually formed and how different colors interact with one another. To select the perfect colors, you would need to have a perfectly clear vision of the way your brand needs to be perceived by your audience. This also requires you to have consistency over the ideal perception of your brand over all possible media. Therefore, it is important to use colors wisely to design your brand identity. Since most colors work best in groups, it would best benefit your brand identity is you would be able to have all the same colors working in a scheme together.

Which are the Best Color Combinations?

The ideal combination of colors can have the best impact on the way your logo impacts various aspects such as attention, being visible at night and in dark settings, eye-strain, etc. This is an important thing to choose when getting colors that would be used for your website, signing, marketing, and more. Therefore, it is important to choose families of colors that could be developed to support all the media and communication channels that your branding campaign would require using.

As per the basics, there are two major ways to group colors – Analogous and Triadic. These are easy to study with the help of the color wheel which helps to see all complementary or Triadic colors at a glance. These lie opposite to each other and help increase the contrast in the color scheme. On the other hand, analogous colors are the ones that are adjacent to each other and can help you to increase the variety of color options and shades that you may have at your disposal.

Ideas on How to Implement Colors in Branding and Logo Design

While some popular colors are used to unify an identity, others can be used to help in the clarification of brand architecture via the different products or business lines under a brand. In such cases, families of colors support a ton of communication needs.

Take FedEx for example. They have a brand architecture that is clearly defined with the help of different colors in their business lines. For example, their Green represents Ground Services; Orange represents the energy and speed of their Express Deliveries, and so on. Ensuring an optimum balance of colors in the branding of your business. This will also help to ensure that the challenge of unifying colors across various mediums and electronic media stays constant.

This consistency can be observed well with the example of MasterCard which uses a combination of different colors in various mediums; however, it still maintains the consistent color scheme consumers have come to associate with the brand.

The next step in color theory is the learn about RGB and CMYK for digital and print mediums respectively.

The Difference between RGB and CMYK

In simple terms, the additive colors are those which have a pure form – they combine to form white. Subtractive colors are the ones that can cancel out and are in turn called impure.

While both look the same while observing on the color wheel, they do start to seem different when observed with the help of color pickers. This mostly because the spectrums of RGB and CMYK are different. Therefore, something that looks vibrant on a computer screen can end up looking bleached on a printed paper. Apart from these two, you can also use Pantone Color Palettes to show the same colors in both print and digital mediums. RGB is usually represented with the use of HEX codes for online mediums such as Web Pages.

These are the basics that will help you choose the right color for your logo and branding. Hope it helps you make the right decision.

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