We asked JXM Associate Creative Director Mariella McNeany to shed some light on color, and how she goes about building color palettes for our client brands at JXM.
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How do these colors make you feel? Excited? Joyful? Gloomy? Hungry?
From advertising to fine art, we use color to evoke emotion and derive meaning from images. Color is a form of non-verbal communication. Your brain processes color before you are consciously aware of it. Color theory is the study of how colors make us feel; it is an essential resource for intentionally communicating information through visuals.
When creating a color palette, it’s important to be aware of the emotional associations tied to colors.
The color wheel is separated into warm and cool colors. This distinction is used heavily in color theory. Warm colors feel vivid and energetic, and advance into space. Cool colors feel calm, and recede into the background. The interplay of warm and cool colors, of their advancing and receding effects, creates the perception of depth. This effect originates in the human eye, which adjust when focusing. This adjusts when focusing on colors of different wavelengths. Red light waves have a longer wavelength than blue ones. Red light is one end of the visible spectrum, while blue and violet light are on the other. White, black, and gray are neutral colors, which also influence how a palette is perceived.
How I create a palette
First, I determine what kind of mood I want to set for a brand. My goal is to choose colors that echo the qualities the brand wants to communicate. For me, the first step to building a brand identity is creating the color palette. It sets the tone for the other elements to come. Let’s say I’m creating a palette for a brand that wants to be viewed as trustworthily, stable, and knowledgeable. I would begin by experimenting with colors that evoke those specific qualities.
They key below provides a general guide to how we perceive primary.
Nuances of color
Shades and tints of the same color express different qualities. Take these three shades of blue for example. They all fall under the “cool” color category, and embody the general qualities of blue — but each blue communicates subtle nuances to the viewer.
Balance
Balance is also meaningful when choosing colors that will work well together. A quick test I do when creating a palette is something I call the “grayscale color test.” This test makes it easy to see the tonal variation in your palette. You need colors to complement each other, in both color and tone.
If your palette looks similar to the image below, the grayscale color test will show how little contrast your colors have on a tonal level.
If your palette looks similar to the image below, the grayscale color test will show the dynamic range of tones in your palette.
Having a palette that includes saturated colors paired with subdued colors will also aid in your design. When you’re trying to achieve a visual hierarchy of information or text, having your colors contrast against each other is key to achieving this depth. In practice, you will want one element to stand out and be read first, and all other information to recede into the background and be read last. Your eye naturally follows these patterns before your brain can even think about it.
A common mistake brands make
One of the most common issues I see are palettes made up of only saturated colors, only subdued colors, or palettes made up of only warm colors or only cool colors. Palettes that are made up of similar tones/saturations will be very difficult to design with. The colors in your palette may look good together as a whole, but you must also experiment with how your colors work when layered, and in various combinations. When creating a brand palette, these colors need to be dynamic enough to create many different designs in many different mediums. There need to be a good amount of color combinations that work well together in order to keep your design pieces looking fresh for a long time.
How to create a palette that goes the distance
Using your working palette, place text in one color of the palette over each of the other colors, and repeat to create all possible combinations. Take a close look, how does each combo effect the legibility of your text? How do these color combos work together in practice?
Do they create the feel you’re looking for? If only two of the five chosen palette colors work well together, the palette needs more refining. Including more colors that vary in tone from each other will help solve this problem.
If hue have questions on how to build an award-winning color palette, don’t hesitate to reach out to JXM.
