What Hue are You?

When building a website or any brand collateral we continually see that for the small and medium size business owner a major challenge is picking out an appropriate color palette.

For those of you with larger budgets you are likely used to having style guides to follow and implement. Back in my Coca Cola days we would talk so much about colors - product color, brand collateral color etc. - Coca Cola Red in Spencerian script is what it was all about.

Here is a simple color guide that can help you to begin to define your brand:

Red = Love, Adventure, Hunger, Appetite, Action, Excitement....

White = Purity, Cleanliness, Simplicity, Clarity

Black = Darkness, Secrecy, Mystery, Seriousness, Anger

Grey = Reserved, Neutrality, Indifference, Stoic

Blue = Trust, Power, Professionalism, Calmness, Seriousness

Green = Nature, Money, Health, Healing, Openness

Brown = Earth, Nature, Simplicity, Primitive

Orange = Comfort, Creativity, Celebration, Youth, Affordability

Purple = Justice,Luxury, Fantasy, Dreams, Vision, Ambiguity

Yellow = Curiosity, Playfullness, Amusement, Carefree

Pink = Softness, Sweetness, Innocense, Youth, Tenderness

Although not a complete list - you get the point. Over the next few days start to look at the clothes people wear around you and see how their personalities match up to the descriptions above - you'll be amazed!

The creative process can be a painful process - but if we look into what we want our customers to visually perceive about our brands we can "say" quite a lot before a single word is spoken.

Eric Archuleta
Eric At Arch Media Inc dot com