This fifth part of Brand Building 101 is thankfully more creative fun, and less clinical in nature.

In this installment, we’ll dive a bit deeper into the fifth phase of brand building – your palette.

5. Choosing Your Brand’s Palette

Now that you’ve decided on your brand’s name, anchored in sound research, you’ll need to decide how best to visualize it. Let’s start with a meaningful color palette and related font choices that will comprise the visual foundation. You’ll definitely need these decided before embarking on building your website, or any collateral that you might consider creating.

Selecting Brand Colors

Color doesn’t simply define your brand’s look, it helps to communicate feeling and focus across all your brand’s assets. You’ll want to choose a palette that is different than your competition, and give you a head start on differentiating yourself from them.

Start with a basic understanding of Color Psychology. This will help guide and inform the color choices you make, especially as it relates to your logo (that’s coming next!).

Infographics like this below are readily available on the internet, and provide similar associations for colors that will be helpful to review and learn.

Give some consideration to placing text over the color palette you choose. At times it may be white, black or a shade of grey – and on light and dark backgrounds. Color scheme generators, like Coolors, help organize complimentary palettes while providing design details (like hex codes) tht will help you keep it consistent going forward.

Identifying Your Brand Fonts

Consider fonts readily available for print design and web use.

Select no more than two complimentary font styles with a variety of options and weights for future design use. Choose one for your website headings, and another for your body copy text. You are not restricted to these fonts for your logo design.

Use a free tool like Font Pair to choose from a great library of fonts that go well together and download them for use when needed.

In our next post, we’ll dive into a critical next step in developing your brand – your logo.