The Psychology of Colors in Designing Logos for Businesses

By Jeff Zein

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Branding, logos, marketing, and design are all critical aspects of a successful business. By creating a compelling brand, you are better able to attract customers and make your business prosper. There’s also an essential link between all of the previous; It’s color.

The way colors are used when choosing the symbol of your brand, the visual content you want to appear, and the marketing campaigns that need slogans and banners. Colors deserve much love and understanding to use them better, and this article will tell you why.

Visual Recall

The phenomenon that makes colors powerful in visual marketing is the ability to remember. Logos, banners, and ads designed with the right color combination can be called up quickly by customers and last in their minds longer. 

The effect becomes even more significant if you have a story to tell through your product and employ the relevant colors to make that happen. The unconscious cues that colors convey allow people to decide about buying a product immediately.

The best way to benefit from colors for your brand is by having all the visuals aligned with your vision. Choose the colors that best represent what your brand is all about, and be picky about contrast.

Color Characteristics

This part will now tell you why blue is suitable for one occasion and red for another. Each color has its own story and depending on what you want to mean, you’ll choose the right one to do the job. Let’s start with the popular choices:

  1. Blue: it’s the color choice of companies offering professional services of any kind. Blue communicates calm, sophistication, natural ability, and confidence, essential in business, law, or finance industries.
  2. Red: the color of brands wanting to communicate urgency. Red turns out to be a trendy choice for food retailers and vacation spots.
  3. Purple: it’s called the regal color for a reason. Purple appears on ads and services that are usually expensive and high-class. It signifies that those with top dollars should spend money on luxurious offerings.
  4. Black: the rugged color of serious people. Black is used in contexts where style and maturity are important, and this is primarily a popular choice in fashion stores.
  5. Green: it’s the color associated with sustainability, peace, and growth. Green appears in ads emphasizing environmental safety or covers self-development courses.

Color Symbolism

As we discussed in the previous section, colors symbolize different things. It’s essential to consider the context when talking about what kind of colors you want to use and your target audience.

What one might consider a call for urgency when they see the color red, others might view it as a symbol of violence or gore. The same applies to something like blue, which might be dull and uninspiring for a subset of people while looking very professional to others.

To benefit from the symbolism of colors, it’s always a good idea to do proper market research before designing something that uses colors to sell. 

Color Schemes

The choice for a single color soon extends to choosing a color scheme. It is crucial if you want your colors to appear on business cards, publications, prints, or any other form of material that you can think of. Again, choosing a suitable color scheme means understanding what you are trying to sell and to whom.

Color schemes help with changing people’s perceptions about things. The combination of colors such as red, orange, and yellow appearing in the same place can make people feel hotter than it normally is. Similarly, blue, green, and purple give off the opposite effect. 

The goal behind choosing the right color schemes is to avoid putting colors together randomly. The psychology behind choosing colors is well-supported in the business world everywhere. 

However, picking apart colors that are not related can make your ads and marketing efforts look clumsy. It’s ok to experiment, but it’s also important not to try to reinvent the wheel every time.

Conclusion

Although the logo design of any brand is important on its own, it’s enough to be effective if there’s no care taken to ensure that every surrounding aspect is good as well. The color aspect of a logo is essential, as we’ve seen here.

You can create desirable outcomes for your business if you know which color combinations best suited a specific objective. At the same time, you now know better than to simply string together a rainbow-like structure and slap it on your ads because such an endeavor leads to huge losses everywhere.

 

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