How to Create a Cohesive Color Palette
This is a bi-weekly newsletter of curated actionable insights, social media, and branding tips, and resources for mission-driven brands, business owners, and influencers. Let’s make your brand stand out and build a community around it! Join our community here and follow us on Instagram.
Creating a cohesive color palette is probably one of the most exciting parts of our job when it comes to branding, designing websites, and designing Instagram Feeds for our clients.
Who doesn’t love mixing and matching beautiful shades and tones to tell your story?
But there is more to it than just putting a bunch of pretty colors together in round little circles and calling it a palette.
There is a method to the madness. Here is our step by step process in creating a cohesive color palette for your brand:
Make a Moodboard
Start by curating a board on Pinterest of images that catch your attention or evoke an emotion that you want your brand to give off.
And remember, these images don’t have to relate to your business directly. These images can capture the vibe and feeling you want your ideal client to feel when they associate your brand. What feeling do you want to evoke?
Your inspiration board can be full of anything from a cozy sweater to a draw-dropping mountain landscape. A beautiful fragrance package to drool-worthy styled pieces of food.
Once your mood board is done, you should get an overall sense of the tone of what your color palette is going to look like.
Color Psychology
Image Source: Elissa Surabian
Now that you have a basic idea of what color direction you will be taking your brand, think about how it relates psychologically to your ideal target audience.
And if you’re not sure who your ideal target audience is yet, we'll be sharing more on that on Thursday this week.
If you’re to give off feelings of warmth and happiness – using a dark blue probably isn’t the best way to go.
Canva has a great introduction to color psychology which you can take a look at here.
Four Elements of Color Hierarchy
To create a consistent color hierarchy in your brand, you need a minimum of at least one of each of the following four elements:
LIGHT
To use as neutral backgrounds or text over darker images and sections of a website.
DARK
To be used opposite of your light color – ie over lighter images and for sections of a website.
MID-RANGE
These colors need to be versatile enough that they and not clash or compete with each other, and round out your palette. Can also be used as background.
ACCENT
This is the color in your palette to make things “pop”. You want to use a color that gives visual interest, yet still works cohesively with the rest of your palette. Note – your “pop” will be relative to your brand strategy, and overall vibe. This doesn’t mean that your pop has to be neon or super bright.
Test Your Palette
Okay, so you’ve got a bunch of beautiful little circles in a row making up your new color palette…
But do they actually work together?
Test, test, and I cannot stress this enough, test again your colour palette!
One of the biggest mistakes we've made early on in our creative career was not testing colors together within the brand elements to see how they work.
If you don’t have your brand design elements yet, layer the colors on top of each other and keep an eye out for any “clash” or “stress” between the colors. If there is a clash, make a change.
Tweak Your Palette
After testing, you might have come across a color or two in your palette that is just too similar or gives off a feeling of the clash. This is where you’ll want to tweak your palette before finalizing it.
Sometimes it’s just adjusting the color by a shade or two, or sometimes this is going back to step one, and pulling a new color out of your mood board to test and tweak again.
One of our favorite tools to find new shades is coolors.co. They have an easy shade picker so you can test and tweak until you nail your color palette, right down to the last hex code. They also offer a Color Contrast Checker, which we love!
Once you've nailed it down, Coolors also allows you to download the color palette with the hex codes. We use this process all the time, especially when we are building Squarespace Websites for our clients or their Instagram Feeds.
And there you have it! Happy color palette creating!
Any questions? Reach out to us - hello@craveablesocial!
Top News + Trends
Instagram Introduces Subscriptions for Creators (Later)
How Big Brands Can Leverage The Authenticity Of Influencer Marketing (Forbes)
10 Marketing Entrepreneurs & Influencers To Follow In 2022 (International Business Times)
How do I validate the product-market fit before going into bulk production? (Lolita Taub / Twitter)
Web3 Is the Future of the Creator Economy (Entrepreneur)
Top 8 Strategies for Affiliate Marketing (Influencer Marketing Hub)
Referral Program Launch 🚀
Last week has been a real hustle here at Craveable Social. We relaunched our website and also added our Referral Program.👏
We'd love for you to recommend us to your friends, family, and other biz besties!
We do our best to work with other mission-driven businesses that are as passionate about their work as you are. Along with our heartfelt thanks, we have a fabulous referral program that we’d love for you to be a part of.
HERE'S HOW IT WORKS:
👉 You refer someone
👉 They book a project with us
👉 You get 5% of the invoiced project OR a 15% OFF any service with us!
To refer a client DM or text us 415-489-0337 for details. You can also view more here 👉 https://www.craveablesocial.com/referral
What's your hustle this week? ✨ Share it with us on Instagram here.