How to choose colours for your start-up
How to choose colours for your business
Have you ever thought about how you should or could choose colours for your start-up?
- There are different factors and questions to ask yourself first:
- Who is your ideal target audience and what do they like?
- Who are your competitors and what do they use?
- What kind of colours represent your values and your kind of business?
- What kind of colours do you like?
These questions should get you started.
And if you would like to dive even deeper, there is a great article here about colour psychology.
Another thing to know is that when you define your colours, you should think about the exact colours, and not just ‘Blue’ ‘Red’ etc. There are a lot of shades of each colour and to ensure that you are always using the same colour – digital and in printing – and also that other people use the exact same colour when they create material for you, you need to define the colour codes. Here is a great tool that can help you with it.
Each colour is made up of a mix of base colours.
And here is a quick overview of colour code explanation:
- RGB – Red Green Blue – is used for your screen i.e. PowerPoint – usually shown as follows 20/30/50 (meaning you have 20% Red, 30 % Green, 50% Blue)
- HEX code (#) – usually used for online work. You will see this on your website and it is made up of numbers and letters.
- CMYK – Cyan (Blue), Magenta (a kind of Pink), Yellow, Key (Depth, Black). This is used in printing (when printing in 4 colours) and it shows as follows 20/30/10/20 (meaning you have 20% Cyan, 30% Magenta, 10% Yellow, 20% Black).
- Pantone – Is a pre-mixed colour. Usually shown with a number or number with a letter i.e. Pantone 263a
Be aware that each screen shows the colour differently though, so don’t rely only on your screen.
You can decide just to have one colour or a colour palette. The tool that I mentioned above will help you with this https://coolors.co/
Play around with it and see which colour scheme you come up with for your startup.
Additional resources