How to choose the best colour for your logo [Part 1]
Why Color Matters
You company logo is your main brand identifier. It will appear in all your product and marketing materials. It will be your foremost visible advertisement to the world. With this in mind, your logo needs to be distinctive and carry your core brand message.
The color/s of your logo is the main guide upon which your brand color scheme should be based on. This palette, in turn, will be applied to your product packaging and marketing materials. If you choose your logo color wisely and you apply its corresponding palette consistently, you can seed and nurture recognition for your brand in your target audience.
People make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or product within 90 seconds of initial viewing. Between 60%-90% of that assessment is based on color alone – Impact of Color on Marketing, 2006
Why It’s Not So Simple
Choosing your logo color should not be as arbitrary as applying your favorite color to it just because you’re the company owner. It is also not as simple as picking out a color based on some table of stereotyped color associations you found in some marketing blog.
Take heed that a lot of the conversations today about the psychology of color and how it relates to marketing mostly consist of hunches and anecdotal evidence. As yet, there is limited research on this field that’s backed with hard data. What experts do agree on is that our perception of color is highly dependent on our personal contexts and experiences. Yellow, for example, might mean humility to Buddhist monks, but it is also associated with cowardice in a Western setting.
Everyone perceives colors differently. We can’t ascribe a universal emotional effect to a specific color because how we see a color will always be affected by factors such as our past experiences, culture, religion, natural environment, gender, race, and nationality.
What nearly every academic study on color and branding tells us though, is that your brand colors should support the brand personality you want to portray rather than aligning them with cliché associations. We should also look to established brands to learn the “standards” they’ve set with regard to expressing their personalities through the colors they’ve chosen.
