Colors have a direct impact on how people feel. Brands use colors to send a message to their audience. While branding a business requires you to have clear messaging, you must also consider the colors you use throughout your marketing efforts, including on your website and in marketing materials like pamphlets and advertisements.
Building a brand means finding the best ways to help customers identify you while ensuring your design, copy, and messaging tell the world who you are. Whether you’re trying to build your brand identity or are looking for the best way to rebrand, you need colors that send a message.
Finding the best color palette for your business is crucial. Color palettes are an important part of branding. Therefore, when developing a digital brand, you must have some identity to ensure customers will recognize you from your marketing efforts. Since colors have an impact on how consumers perceive brands, it’s crucial to find the right color scheme for your business.
Learn how to develop your unique brand voice, design a beautiful website, and create content that grabs attention with a little help from us.
What is a color palette?
A color palette is a combination or set of colors you use to define your brand and begin creating a user experience. Brands use it to showcase their individual personalities and ultimately attract customers, but a color palette used for branding is about more than choosing beautiful color schemes.
A color palette consists of multiple colors and hues that work together to create a visual experience for your customers. Most individuals are familiar with the color wheel, which can help you find the right colors to form your brand identity.
Designers use color palettes when designing logos, websites, and other marketing creatives and materials that help maintain brand consistency across mediums and make interacting with your brand enjoyable for customers. There are many different types of color palettes to take inspiration from when designing your brand. The different types of palettes include:
- Monochromatic palettes use different shades of just 1 color.
- Analogous palettes use 3 colors located together on the color wheel.
- Complementary colors are located at opposite ends of the color wheel and produce the most contrast.
- Split-complementary colors use more than 1 set of colors across from each other on the color wheel.
- Triadic colors are 3 separate colors at different ends of the color wheel.
- Tetradic palettes are similar to triadic colors, but they use 4 colors on the color wheel at an equal distance apart.
Because these colors will appear everywhere in connection to your brand, including on business cards, websites, landing pages, and print marketing materials, you must identify the colors that will resonate most with your audience.
Colors are what customers see when they look at your brand, so they’re one of the first impressions any new customers will have of your business. While colors may not seem like an important aspect of branding, choosing the perfect color palettes for your brand is important because they can influence your customer’s behavior and the success of your business. Here are a few reasons why color is important for branding businesses:
Influences decision-making and perception
Colors matter for branding because they can affect how customers perceive your business. Believe it or not, color can have a major influence on purchasing decisions. Your brand’s palette is responsible for conveying a message, and different colors have different meanings. When designing your brand, consider color psychology and how colors impact behaviors (including buying behaviors).
Of course, different colors mean different things, so you might need to brush up on your color theory before branding your business. For example, you may notice many websites use different shades of blue. Blue is perceived as a color that represents dependability and trustworthiness. Examples of blue being used for brand identity include Facebook and Paypal.
Improves accessibility
Website and digital accessibility refers to making your online marketing tools accessible to everyone, including those with certain disabilities. One way colors can help make your website more accessible is through contrast.
By using bright colors on top or dark background colors or vice versa, you can improve the way someone views your website. Additionally, you can choose colors based on color blindness. For example, the most common form of color blindness is red-green color blindness. By avoiding those colors in your branding, you can improve accessibility in email marketing, on your website, and on other marketing materials.
Did you know? Facebook’s brand colors aren’t blue because blue is a color that people perceive with trustworthiness; they’re blue because Mark Zuckerberg is colorblind, and blue is the color he sees the best. Take a note from Facebook when considering your branding colors to ensure everyone has the ability to see and understand your visual messaging.
Enhances brand consistency
Brand consistency is a way to help your potential customers more easily recognize your business based on consistent messaging and imagery. If you use different colors and designs throughout your marketing materials, customers won’t be able to associate you with one single message, which can make remembering your brand difficult.
When customers see your advertisement online and click through to your website, they expect to see the same messaging and colors to show them they’re in the right place. Additionally, your blog should match the rest of your website, so read up on blog design tips to ensure you’re using best practices.
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Now that you understand the importance of colors in business, you must find the right colors to convey your brand’s unique messaging and personality. A color palette generator, also known as a color combo generator, can help you find the best colors, shades, and tones for your brand based on the color wheel.
If you don’t have an eye for design, color palette builder can help you find colors that match and look great together to ensure your brand consistently delivers a good experience whenever customers or potential customers interact with it. Here are a few of the best color palette generators you can start using today.
Adobe Color
If you’re familiar with the Adobe Suite of design products, you may feel right at home using Adobe Color, a color schemes generator that allows you to easily select the right colors and color combinations for your brand, no matter what type of color palette you want to use.
Adobe Color can help you find the right color for your brand by uploading images to generate your color palette. Therefore, if you find an image you like or are already using imaging in your marketing strategy, you can find the right colors to match your existing marketing collateral. Adobe Color is free to use for anyone, so you don’t need an account to get started.
ColorSpace
ColorSpace is another popular color combo generator that’s free to try right now. With ColorSpace, you can begin finding the best color palette for your brand by using color codes or the color gradient feature.
This tool is best used if you have a specific color in mind and are looking for other colors that will match it. However, you can also experiment and try to find a color palette based on colors you’re already using in association with your brand.
Khroma
Khroma is a great tool for designers of all levels. Khroma uses machine learning to help you find and generate unique color palettes based on your brand.
This tool requires slightly more work than the others listed above because it takes you through a process of choosing a set of 50 colors before you can see your palette. Then, through machine learning, Khroma uses the colors you’ve selected to find a color palette based on your unique preferences and delivers combinations based on those choices.
Canva
Canva is a tool designed to help anyone with any background design marketing materials for their business. With the Canva color palette generator, you can upload images, and Canva will select a palette based on the colors of those images. You can also create a custom color palette or explore pre-made color combinations.
When creating your own custom color palette, Canva will show you the color wheel and ask you to choose a color, and a type of color combination, then display the 2 colors below. Canva is one of the easiest color scheme generators to use, but it’s more limited than the other robust tools.
Color Hunt
Color Hunt is another free and easy-to-use tool that has a collection of pre-designed color palettes for brand use. Once you search for a color palette by selecting a color or collection, you can begin browsing through thousands of automatically generated color schemes created by other designers.
How to choose the right color palette generator for your needs
Whether you're designing a website, bringing your brand to life, or creating eye-catching social media posts, here's what to look for when picking the right color palette builder for your brand:
User-friendly interface
Not everyone is a design expert, and that's okay. Look for a color palette builder that feels intuitive from the start. You should be able to jump in and start experimenting with colors without watching lengthy tutorials. The best tools let you easily upload photos and quickly generate color combinations that match your vision.
Flexible customization
Your projects are unique, so your color palette builder should be flexible enough to adapt to different needs. The tool should let you fine-tune individual colors, save multiple versions of your palettes, and adjust them as your project evolves. Being able to extract colors from existing photos or brand resources and materials is especially helpful when you're working with established design elements.
Integrates with your other tools
The most practical color palette builders play nice with other design software. Look for tools that can export your color palettes in formats that work with popular design programs. Whether you're dropping colors into Photoshop or sharing hex codes with your team, smooth integration makes your workflow much more efficient.
As technology evolves, so too do color palette builders. Advanced features are more sophisticated and help streamline the entire design process. Whether you're working solo or with a team, these features can make a significant difference in how you approach color selection:
AI-powered color suggestions
The latest color palette builders use artificial intelligence to analyze successful design patterns and color combinations to understand what works best in different contexts. When you input your initial colors, the AI can suggest complementary shades that you might not have considered, often leading to more unique and effective color schemes.
Beyond basic color matching, these intelligent systems can adapt to specific industry needs and brand personalities. Some advanced tools can even analyze your existing brand materials or website to suggest palettes that align with your current identity while offering fresh variations.
Accessibility testing tools
Many advanced color palette generators have made accessibility testing an integral part of the design process. Instead of treating accessibility as an afterthought, these tools actively check your color combinations against WCAG guidelines as you work.
With real-time feedback, you can catch potential visibility issues early, saving yourself time while ensuring the design works well for everyone from the start.
Real-time collaboration features
Modern collaboration features allow multiple team members to work together on color schemes in real time, similar to how you might collaborate on a shared document. Team members can leave feedback, suggest alternative colors, and track changes throughout the design process.
These collaboration tools also help maintain consistency across larger organizations. With shared color libraries and permission settings, teams can ensure everyone uses approved color palettes across different projects and materials.
Use colors to set your brand identity
Color matters when it comes to building your brand identity.
When paired with the perfect words, color can enhance all aspects of your marketing efforts by boosting brand awareness, improving the customer experience, and evoking emotions in your customers that make them want to take action. When identifying the right colors for your brand, consider what messages you’re trying to convey and which colors can support your branding efforts.
Once you've nailed down your color palette, bring it to life across all your marketing channels with Mailchimp. From building your website and landing pages to creating social media posts and digital ads, you can easily apply your brand colors throughout the customer journey.
Our design tools help maintain consistency across every touchpoint, while our marketing automation ensures your branded content reaches the right audience at the right time.
Key Takeaways
- Color palette builders are essential tools for creating brand identities, helping businesses choose colors that resonate with their audience and maintain consistency across all marketing materials.
- From basic color matching to AI-powered suggestions, modern color palette builders offer features for both beginners and professional designers, with options to test accessibility and collaborate in real-time.
- The right color combinations can significantly impact customer perception and buying decisions, making it crucial to choose a color scheme that aligns with your brand message and values.