How your dream client feels about your brand pulls more weight than what they think about a brand. Let that sink in for a second!

Pair that with the fact that certain colors evoke certain emotions and suddenly it all makes sense — your brand colors play a huge part in your ability to get clients.

You can’t create a brand and website without creating a color palette — or at least you shouldn’t — so let’s dive into how to do just that.

The 5 color palette

I like to use a 5 color palette which includes a primary color, a secondary color, an accent, a dark neutral, and a light neutral.

The primary color

The primary color is what you’ll use in your logo and will be the glue that holds together your look and feel. It is the main color that shines through in your branding.

It’s possible that your primary color may actually be your favorite color or a color that you look good wearing so that your bio portraits match your brand, however, what’s most important to keep in mind is that your primary color must align with how you want your dream client’s to feel when they see your marketing materials. So try your best to put your personal preferences aside and be strategic when it comes to choosing your branding colors.

The secondary color

The secondary color is used to support the primary color. You’ll often see it used in the logo as well. It will also show up alongside the primary color in images and backgrounds

The accent color

The accent color is used to make something stand out from the primary and secondary colors and is usually reserved for things you want to draw attention to such as calls to action, for example.

The dark neutral

The dark neutral is mainly used for your body text.

The light neutral

The light neutral for a soft background color and overlays.

Even though you may really be tempted to use more than 5 colors in your palette, it is important that you don’t. In this case, it is really true that less equals more.

By keeping your palette simple and limiting how many colors you use, your brand will appear clean and professional. Having too many colors in your palette will dilute the “punch” your brand needs to make to be memorable.

How to choose colors

So how do you determine what colors to use in your palette? This is one of the questions I get the most often when it comes to DIYing your brand. It all comes down to using a bit of color theory along with your brand’s personality.

For example, brown evokes an earthy, reliable, and comfortable feel while green evokes nature, prosperity, and renewal.

A great place to start is by creating a vision or brand board full of images the convey your brand’s personality. When you have a set of images put together to inspire the way you want your business to appear you’ll be able to pinpoint what colors stand out. Then you can use those as a starting point.

Coolors.co is a fantastic place to go for generating color palettes. Let’s say you’ve chosen your primary color. You can add in that color code, lock it in, and then simply click the space bar to change out the colors and lock them as you find the ones you like.

Another tip is to add in your primary color and use the shade tool to determine your dark neutral..

Now, if you’re wondering “How do I figure out my brand personality?” Learn my 4-step process to find your brand personality.