By Scott Smith

Choosing a logo design for your small business is a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Many entrepreneurs often rush this process, as they are excited to launch their business and just want to get going. Having to rebrand your business down the line, because your logo doesn’t speak to your core demographic, can be a costly undertaking. It’s advisable to do your homework ahead of time and choose a logo that will stand the test of time. In addition to choosing the right font(s) and graphic color choice deserves additional attention. Colors convey a message. This article will provide some guidelines on how to choose the perfect colors for your new logo.

What Message Do You Want to Convey?

Entrepreneurs tend to go with their favourite color when they create a logo. Of course it’s your business and you need to be happy with your logo and brand colors. Having said that, just because you love orange doesn’t mean it’s best suited to sell to your target audience. The visual aspect of a company logo should be driven by the message the business owner wants to convey. This is a good time to write or review your mission and vision statements. Once you know exactly what message you want to convey you can move on to the next step – choosing a primary logo color. 

Color Psychology

Different colors convey different messages. That’s why the previous step is so important. Choose your color based on the message you want to convey. Here are the eight big brand colors and their associated meanings: 

Black 

Black, although not technically a color, conveys power, formality and elegance. This is a good choice for businesses offering a luxury service or product for example. 

Blue 

Blue is one of the most popular branding colors as it conveys trust, confidence and wisdom. It is no surprise many financial companies employ blue as their primary brand color. 

Green

Green stands for growth, freshness, harmony and nature. Of course this is a popular choice for organic and naturally sourced businesses. 

Red

Red is another popular branding color. This bold color represents strength, power, passion and love. 

Yellow

This color represents joy, happiness energy and intellect. Due to its light nature yellow is best used as an accent or complimentary color.

Orange

Orange is a fun branding color and depending on the intensity can be very bold. Similar to yellow it communicates joy, sunshine as well as tropics. 

Purple

Purple communicates luxury, power, luxury and ambition. Purple is yet another bold color. It’s important to choose the right intensity so it doesn’t become overbearing. 

White

Like black, white isn’t a color. The use of negative space and white is an effective tool in logo design. White stands for cleanliness, purity and safety. 

Matching Colors

Once you choose a primary logo color it’s important to find complementary colors. You might want to incorporate the secondary colors in your logo and across all of your brand assets like your website, presentation slides, social media posts, etc. To find colors that would work well you can use a color wheel and identify complementary, secondary or analogous colors. There are also free tools available like Coolors.co that let you generate color schemes. Just enter the hex code of your primary color and you can find matching color schemes.

When in Doubt Conduct a Survey 

If you are struggling to decide on a color conduct a survey. Create your logo in a few different color variations and present it to your close circle like business partners, friends and family. If you are looking for more unbiased and very relevant feedback you can conduct a local survey and ask people in your target audience. To get even more scalable feedback you can use a tool like Google Surveys. Create a survey and give respondents the different color options and let them decide which one they like best. It’s free to create a survey but Google charges a small fee per response. Since you can set the demographics for your respondents this is a worthwhile investment.  

Conclusion

If you don’t have a graphic design background it can be intimidating to come up with and decide on a design that will represent you and your business. The tips highlighted above will help you find a color scheme for your logo that will convey the right message and speak to your core demographic. Once you finalize your logo you can then complete all your other brand assets and start promoting your business with confidence.