What the colour of your logo says about your brand

Colour is important when it comes to brand design. We react differently to certain colours – allowing them to influence our decisions and come to conclusions about something before we have even tried the product.

Red Logos

It’s a well known fact that red is a colour symbolising passion but did you also know that it can encourage you to eat? The colour itself doesn’t make you hungry but it evokes feelings of happiness, excitement and love – feelings many of us harbour towards our favourite foods. Millie’s Cookies, Burger King and Coca Cola all enjoy red colour branding and the success that goes with it.

If you are using red in your logo design you are a company that wants to promote happiness, passion or even power. You want your customers to trust you and you will boldly earn that trust by using an emotive colour to convey your message.

Green Logos

Whether you’ve just used recycled cardboard and papermached it into business cards or had 500 printed at Helloprint if you use green in your logo people will still associate you with being environmentally friendly and eco conscious. Green represents natural, so works well with beauty brands that want to promote products that apparently have no harsh chemicals.

Blue Logos

Blue is a colour associated with power and responsibility, which is why organisations such as the police and banks like to use them within their branding. Using blue in your logo usually means you want to be considered trustworthy by your clients but beware, blue is such a popular colour that it’s used everywhere and can lose it’s meaning. However, five out of the ten most valuable brands in the world use the colour in their branding and look where that got them.

Purple logos

Purple is synonymous with luxury and royalty. Cadbury’s chocolate features it in their branding material (the brand tried to trademark Pantone 2685C, so that only they could use it, but lost their legal battle in 2013). If you want to represent decadence then your logo needs to use a rich, full purple colour contrasted with white or black or even gold. Black, when used as the primary colour, also conveys the same message if used correctly, just look at Chanel, Hotel Chocolat and Yves Saint Laurent.

Is colour important?

No matter which way you look at it, colour is important when it comes to branding because our brains associate colour with certain emotions or memories. Choose the wrong colour and you could create a negative tone for your brand (an extreme example, but a funeral director wouldn’t use a vivid orange for their logo) choose the right one and you will have customers remembering you for all the right reasons.

Experiment with logos and colour

Play around with your design, get opinions from people you know – and even strangers – before you unveil a logo to the world; it could make all the difference to how your business succeeds.