The Branding Series | Color

Color can have an immense impact on people. It can bring you a feeling of calmness, a happy emotion, remind you of your childhood and so much more. Choosing the colors for your brand is quite possibly one of the most important decisions you'll make when branding. No pressure, though.

The Branding Series | Color by Maker-Monologues.com

I've found that a good number of colors is between 4 and 6, any less and you'll feel limited at times, any more and it'll be overkill. I, personally, like to choose 6, but end up only using 4 or 5. 

Go ahead and open your Brand Mood Board you created in the last assignment. Also, take out your answers from The Full Picture.

There are many different ways you can go about finding your brand colors. You could create a new Pinterest Board and only focus on pinning colors this time. Then notice what colors you're pinning the most.

Some good resources to find color themes are Design Seeds, ColRD, Coolors and, of course, Pantone, along with many others, just search "color schemes.".

But here's how I usually choose my colors. I'll go to my brand mood board, choose around 6-10 photos I really like (focusing on the colors in them), and then create a photo collage from my favorite images. 

The Branding Series | Color by Maker-Monologues.com

I'll upload it to Coolers and either has the software automatically choose colors from the collage (it will choose up to 5 colors) and you can keep clicking "Auto" for it to continue generating different color schemes. Or, they have a color picker tool where you can click on an area of the image to get the color you want. 

The Branding Series | Color by Maker-Monologues.com

I wasn't liking any of the color schemes I was getting from this collage, I'm wanting a color palette that mixes cool and warm colors but with a specific tone of color, not too bright, a little muted. Here were just a few of the color schemes I was getting from this collage.

This one didn't have enough cooler colors in it but I really liked the tone of the colors. 

This one was chosen via the color picker tool. I was trying to find some colors that I liked from the collage that would also pair well with each other. This one is a great option for me. I really love that Mellow Apricot color!

This one was chosen using the color picker tool and I was completely focusing on the angel aura crystals. I just love this palette but felt it was too "baby girl nursery" for what I was looking for.

So I decided to go back and look at a couple of Design Seeds color palettes I had pinned to my mood board to figure out why I was so drawn to them.

I really loved the warm and cool tones in both of these. I also liked the orangey colors in the right palette. So I set off to find one image that I loved. I decided on this watercolor cactus pattern from my mood board made by Angie Makes, who also sells her clip art on Creative Market (I'm definitely buying this once I find it!).

Once I plugged this pattern into Coolors I was just about sold on the color palette they automatically chose right off bat!

I love the minty colors mixed with the warmer blush tones. I also love that there's a dark color and a light color. That's something you also want to think about when choosing your colors. You'll eventually come to a point where you want to place your logo onto a darker image and you realize you only have dark colors, so make sure you have something that will show up on dark images and light images.

I felt there was just one other color I wanted to add to this palette, I was thinking I needed a green, so I clicked Auto one more time to get another color scheme from the cactus pattern.

 I decided to take one of these two greens from the palette above to add it to the 5 colors I got before. I'm not sure if Coolor allowed you to add more colors to your palette so I went over to Colrd to plug in the extra colors. Here are my 2 choices.

This is with the lighter green, and

This is with the darker green...

I'm kinda feeling the darker green. I'm going to sit on it, play with these colors and have my final decision announced in the next assignment, which is all about fonts!

I hope you enjoyed observing my process for choosing brand colors. As always, I want to see what you're coming up with, tag me on Instagram @makermonologues and use the hashtag #MMBranding!