When you are building a brand, choosing a color scheme for your logo design can often be more difficult than coming up with the brand entirely. Making the wrong choice could be damaging to your brand, but it can be hard to tell if you are making the right choice to begin with.

Colors are important when it comes to marketing because you want to ensure you’re invoking the power of emotional connection. This type of connection is important when you are building up your audience and gaining trust in your potential customers. So, how do you know which colors are going to best help you accomplish this? We are here to help you figure it out.

Connecting The Power of Emotion

Colors are psychologically connected to emotions. Certain colors make people feel certain types of emotions, which is why color matters so much in branding and marketing design. One small color tweak can make a big difference for a user without realizing it. For example, after running an experiment in CTA button colors, HubSpot found that a green CTA button outperformed a red one by 21%.

Different industries tend to have different dominating colors depending on what services or products they provide. For example, many banks and credit card companies use blue in their logo because blue evokes trust, loyalty, and security. Therefore, color is an important aspect in making sure you are connecting the right emotions for your brand to your customers and audience base.

What the Colors Really Mean

Each color has positive and negative connotations. Sometimes those negative connotations could pose a risk in certain industries. For example, most fast food industries don’t use the color blue because it can be an appetite-suppressing color since it’s not commonly found in the food we eat regularly.

Here is a quick overview of the positive and negative emotions that are connected to different colors:

• Blue: Trust, honesty, devotion, comfort, unfriendliness, coldness, or a lack of emotion.
• Red: Power, energy, passion, excitement, anger, urgency, danger, or pain.
• Black: Sophistication, power, security, elegance, authority, coldness, evil, oppression, and mourning.
• White: Innocence, calmness, purity, cleanliness, simplistic, plain, cautious, sterile, and empty.
• Green: Hope, prosperity, freshness, growth, nature, boredom, envy, blandness.
• Pink: Imaginative, passionate, fun, quirky, creative, feminine, impulsiveness, and rebelliousness.
• Orange: Courage, warmth, fun, confidence, energy, deprivation, immaturity, and frustration.
• Yellow: Warmth, happiness, youthfulness, creativity, fear, caution, anxiety, and cowardice.
• Purple: Wisdom, spirituality, wealth, sophistication, imagination, moodiness, suppression, and sadness.
• Brown: Structure, protection, security, nature, strength, loneliness, sadness, isolation, and darkness.

Consider the industry in which you are positioning yourself and the emotions you want to invoke. This part takes some research but is important for your decision.

The 60-30-10 Rule

When choosing your own brand’s overall color scheme, Canva recommends using the 60-30-10 rule that many designers follow. That means 60%, 30%, and 10% for each color within your palette.

Start by simply putting colors together. Try to focus on contrasting colors. Experiment with different shades and opposite colors to determine what works best with the image you have in mind. Stick to three colors in total to keep things easy on the eyes. Your base color should be your brand’s most dominant emotion, and then work your way down from there.

Narrowing Down Your Options

So, after all of this information, how do you pick a color scheme that will simultaneously set you apart within your industry but also evoke the right emotions? For example, you may be thinking about picking a color that is not typically used in your industry in order to set your brand apart and make your logo stand out from the crowd. However, this could be risky depending on how your audience will interpret your branding. Sometimes it can be safer to stay within an industry standard, but it depends on what you’re trying to convey.

There is always the option to run a test. Digital marketing is all about testing and tweaking wherever necessary. Things are always changing online, so your brand can constantly evolve with it.