The colours in your logo and branding are often the basis for first impressions so it’s important to make sure the colours are appropriate and portray your intended image. There are countless examples of branding out there that conform to a select colour group, that’s not a random thing; colour schemes provoke emotional responses that affect our attitude toward a product or service. Companies carefully select colours purposefully. Just for starters we’ve outlined four basic colours and what they represent.
R e d
Red is used to denote power, ambition, boldness and strength but also passion, action, excitement and energy. Unsurprisingly in that case, many of the most instantly recognisable logos are red, and even though they’re worlds apart they do tick at least one of the boxes for red connotations. For example, Santander, Virgin, Lego, Mitsubishi, Kellogg’s and The Rolling Stones are each appealing to completely different markets but they’re using red to capture the essence of what they are all about.
Y e l l o w
Yellow is often used to motivate and encourage. It’s seen as a welcoming colour indicative of freedom, impulsiveness and optimism. That being the case yellow seems the obvious colour choice for a wide range of logos and it’s used by all sorts of companies, from Post-It to Ferrari, even in band logos, like Nirvana for example, and information sharing businesses like IMDB or Yell.com.
G r e e n
As you might expect green is used in a lot of environmental fields, or by companies trying to portray a more nature-friendly, fresh image. It also signifies growth, suggests safety, prosperity and restoration as well as health and wellbeing. It’s for these reasons that we see green appearing in logos for supermarkets such as Waitrose and Asda, recreationally for example the Holiday Inn logo, in food products like breath mints, in agriculture take John Deere for example, or in fuel companies as with BP.
B l u e
Blue is a colour that people tend to associate with trust, openness and awareness as well as determination and control. Many companies have used this to their advantage, once again covering a variety of organisation types, from Twitter and Skype to NHS or Oral B, Ford, PayPal and Hewlett Packard. Blue also appears in music related logos like iTunes and Napster and is often paired with other colours to generate multiple associations, for instance Pepsi paired blue and red or Pampers who paired blue with yellow.
As you can see you can say a lot with just a colour, and perhaps find a way to connect with your customer early on. We look at more colours later in the week in part two. In the meantime, click the links below to hear more news from Scruffy Dug on Facebook and Twitter.