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Colors have meaning, so which one should you shoose?

The human eye can register approx. 1,000 levels of dark-light as well as 100 shades of red-green and 100 shades of yellow-blue. This means that we can see a color mix of 1,000 x 100 x 100 which is equivalent to 10 million different colors.

The three colors red, yellow and blue are called primary colors. You can’t mix those colors from other colors. On the other hand, you can mix virtually any color from the primary colors. When you crisscross the three primary colors with each other, you get the colors purple, orange and green, for example.

We always think in several color systems. With digital products, we work with the RGB color palette (red, green, blue). With printed products, we use the CMYK color palette, i.e., 4-color palette – Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow and K (black).

Colors are full of symbolism and contrast. Should the color be cool or warm, should it fit into a specific context and what best suits your product, your service, your business? Sometimes you need to shout and other times the expression needs to be more stylish, simple and elegant or maybe even toned down. You might also need to communicate sustainability and a green agenda. Then the obvious choice would be the green colors in the palette.

When it comes to color, there are no set values. The colors you choose become an important part of your company’s branding and allow us to add a certain value and story to the chosen colors. So a color can have a meaning in one context and a completely different meaning in another. Red can be both love and anger. Purple is another good example. For many people, purple represents education. But purple is also a solemn color that is used, for example, in church contexts. So a color can have several meanings.

However, there are some broadly understood symbols/values ​​for these basic colors:

Green – hope, spring, life, sustainability, nature, ecology, environment
Red – love, hate, heat, fire, life
Blue – cold, calm, fidelity, sky, sea, credibility
Yellow – heat, envy, sale
Brown – soil, calm, death
Black – darkness, evil, style, mystery, elegance
White – purity, innocence, death, peace

You must first and foremost use the colors that you think best suit your services and your business and what you want to communicate. You need to live with your colors every day so you need to feel comfortable in their company 🙂

If you’re a corporate company, you also need to look at your industry competitors. What color are they? Do you need to stand out or do you need to fit into the industry? A lot of banks and financial companies are blue because they want to express gravitas and credibility, so if you choose a completely different color, it may be because you want to be the naughty one of the class – or want to express other values ​​in your market. If you’re an entrepreneurial company and you bring new services or products into play, you can be more colorful, daring and untraditional.

When you need to choose colors, we can help you put together a color palette that works well in relation to your logo, brand and communication platforms, where you communicate with your stakeholders. We look at what works well in your Microsoft Office templates – e.g., Word templates and PowerPoint presentations – and in your printed material and on your website. We find the right colors for you and create the right story in relation to the choice of your color palette. There are often a lot of good arguments for color choice.

The value of a color is both the physical color code in the color systems that you need to use and the value you create as you build your brand. The color choice is one of the important building blocks in your brand and in your visual identity.