Colour it’s a powerful tool in branding, and in life. We all see colour and it helps not only making the world we live in more interesting. It also can help communicate certain messages as is red to stop or danger. As well as it can provoke or influence our mood and emotions such as a red can make us hungry and blue can make us feeling calm. We should remember colour has cultural and historical association that are good to be mindful of.
Instead of tell you how to choose your brand colours which I’ve already covered in episode 23. Today I’m going to share three of my unusual sources to help you find fresh colour inspiration.
Before You Pick Your Brans Colours
Really there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to finding the right tone of colour for your brand, but there is a functional purposes to brand colours. It can reinforce your brand with meaning and even evoke an emotion response from your people. Therefore, there is an in-depth decision making process that should be carried out to help you choose which types of colours will best suit your brand personality. This will include both research and evolution and you can learn more about it in episode. But once you know which colours you want to use for example green, cream and orange it’s now time to find the perfect set and tone of each.
The Popular Place to Seek Colour Inspiration
The most common place you have probably turned to find your brand colours, is looking at your competitors, Pantone, Canva and or Pinterest? Sound about right? These are not wrong or even bad places to start, however I’ve found that sometimes it’s good to mix things up to not keep starting where everyone is looking and instead find slightly more unusual places to seek colour.
Interior Paint
Firstly you should know I love interior design… I’m not sure if I’m so good at it, but it’s a keen interest. Therefore, I’ve now gravitating towards wall paint samples, you can simple look them up online or whenever I’m in an interior shop I like to pick up the physical paper sample deck. Interior design images provides me with inspiration and new ideas to use both colours and textures within my brand projects, just because the final outcome are for screens, doesn’t mean we all have to stick to just digital inspiration when gathering ideas.
Artistic Paintings Palettes
Similar to this, I also gain great colour inspirations from paintings. There are actually many websites, where you can upload an image of painting and it will generate you colour from that image. This can also work with photographs too. This approach is a great way to gain inspiration about the relationship of colours. You can gain may new idea of pairing certain colours together or how to craft a well rounded colour palette where each colour effortlessly compliment the other. Paintings provide us with some much inspiration when it come to colour.
Nail Polish
Lastly the final unusual place I like to gain colour inspiration is from nail polish and other beauty products like lip stick etc. Usual nail polish is more so my go to, I don’t really paint my nail all that much throughout the year. But I do pin a lot of nail polish colours for inspiration. I’m not say go into boots and gain colour inspiration from there limited section of nail polish. But online there are more independent nail polish companies they introduce new collection all year round with some really lovely colours. So either research around for a bit and go on a few website or you can always go on Pinterest and just scroll through nail polish inspo.
remember you may have to tweak or fine tune the colour you find to work for screens and for print. As well as making sure the colour you’ve selected all work harmoniously together. I mean colours is quite literally all around us, so don’t limit yourself to looking at just what others are doing or just looking at one colour source for inspiration. Keep looking around keep exploring and keep finding new ways to get inspiration to help you produce fresh new ideas.
