How to choose brand colours for your business

Think of the shops you know well. You probably remember the colour of their sign or their boxes before you remember the exact name. Colour is one of the fastest ways people recognise a business, and one of the easiest things to get wrong.

This post is a practical guide to choosing brand colours for a small business. It's part of the bigger picture explained in what is brand identity?

What a brand colour palette is

A palette is a small, fixed set of colours that your business uses everywhere: sign, website, packaging, profiles and print. Usually it has:

• One or two main colours that people will associate with you
• One accent colour for things that should stand out, like buttons or offers
• Neutral colours, such as an off-white, a grey or a dark text colour, which do most of the quiet work

Fewer colours, used consistently, are far more recognisable than many colours used at random.

Start with your business, not your favourite colour

Ask yourself a few questions first:

1. How do you want customers to feel? Calm and reassured, like at a clinic? Warm and festive, like at a sweet shop? Fresh and modern, like at a café?
2. What do you already have? If your sign has been maroon and gold for twenty years, that colour may already belong to you in customers' minds.
3. What are others around you using? If every shop in your market is red, a different colour helps you stand out.
4. Who are your customers? A boutique for young professionals and a traditional jeweller may suit very different palettes.

What colours often suggest

Colours don't have fixed meanings, and they vary between cultures and contexts. But some broad associations are useful starting points:

• Blues and navies: trust, calm, professionalism, often used by clinics and services
• Greens: freshness, health, nature, growth
• Reds and maroons: energy, appetite, celebration, very common in food and festive businesses
• Yellows and golds: warmth, optimism, richness
• Pinks and purples: creativity, care, sometimes luxury
• Earthy browns and beiges: natural, handmade, traditional

In India, colours also carry festival and cultural meaning. A sweet shop's palette might sensibly echo the warmth of Diwali, while a diagnostic centre will want something calmer.

Make sure the colours work everywhere

This is the step most businesses skip. Before you settle on a palette, test it:

On a phone

Most people will see your colours on a small screen first. Text must be easy to read against the background colour. Light grey text on white, or red text on green, looks fine to the designer and frustrates everyone else.

In print

Colours on screen and colours on paper are produced differently. Bright screen colours can print dull, and some colours are hard for printers to match. Ask for the print versions of your colours as well as the screen versions.

At small sizes

Your profile picture on Instagram or WhatsApp is tiny. Will your logo and colours still be recognisable there?

For everyone

Some customers have colour blindness or weaker eyesight. Strong contrast between text and background helps them, and helps everyone reading in bright sunlight outside your shop. See website accessibility.

A worked example

Imagine a family-run sweet shop in Faridabad whose sign has been deep maroon with gold lettering for years. A sensible palette keeps the maroon as the main colour, because customers already know it. A warm gold becomes the accent for offers and buttons, used sparingly. A soft cream and a dark brown-grey do the quiet work as background and text. Four colours, each with a job, all of them already connected to the shop in customers' minds.

Write the colours down

Once chosen, your colours should be written down precisely, so every designer, printer and sign maker uses the same ones:

• HEX codes for websites and screens, such as #102A43
• RGB values for other digital uses
• CMYK values for printing

These belong in your brand guidelines, along with simple rules like “buttons are always the accent colour”.

Common mistakes

• Too many colours. Five bright colours fighting for attention make nothing stand out.
• Changing colours every year, following trends rather than building recognition.
• Approximate colours. “Something like blue” leads to five different blues on your sign, website and boxes.
• Poor contrast that makes text hard to read.
• Copying a well-known brand in your area, which confuses customers rather than helping you.

Getting help

Choosing colours is part of our brand identity service. We choose a palette for your business, test it on screen, in print and at small sizes, and hand it over with the exact codes and simple guidelines. Then we use it consistently on your website, profiles and print, as described in one look everywhere.