Brand colors examples: what famous palettes teach

The best brand colors examples, from Coca-Cola's red to Tiffany's pale blue, have one thing in common: a colour chosen early and then repeated, in the same role, for decades. None of them is a secret shade. What they teach is method. Own one colour or one fixed combination in your category, give every other colour a strict job, and keep going long after you are bored of it.

Below are five lessons, each drawn from widely documented palettes. The swatches are approximate screen colours for illustration, not official brand codes.

Lesson 1: own one colour in your category

Coca-Cola has used red for well over a century, on bottles, trucks, fridges and signs. Tiffany & Co. made its robin's egg blue so central that the colour is a registered trademark in the United States and has its own custom Pantone shade, named 1837 Blue after the year the company was founded. Cadbury has used purple since the early twentieth century and fought a long legal battle in the UK to register a specific shade for chocolate, which it ultimately lost on appeal.

Notice that UPS turned brown, a colour most marketers would avoid, into an asset by using it on every van and uniform, and even asking "What can Brown do for you?" in its advertising. The lesson: in your category, an unexpected colour used everywhere beats a fashionable one used sometimes. Whether you can protect a colour legally is a separate question, covered in can you trademark a colour.

Lesson 2: a fixed pair is just as strong

IKEA uses blue and yellow, the colours of the Swedish flag, so its stores read as Swedish from the motorway. McDonald's pairs red and yellow. John Deere pairs green and yellow so consistently that "John Deere green" is used as a colour name in its own right. In each case neither colour is unusual. The pair, used together every time, is what people recognise.

Lesson 3: a multicolour system needs a fixed order

Google uses blue, red, yellow and green, and the order in its wordmark has stayed recognisable through every redesign. Microsoft's logo is four squares in orange red, green, blue and yellow, always in the same arrangement. Many colours can be distinctive, but only when the set, the order and the proportions stay put. A rainbow that reshuffles every time reads as generic.

Lesson 4: a gradient can be a brand colour

When Instagram redesigned its icon in 2016, it replaced a brown camera with a warm gradient running from yellow and orange through magenta to purple. The gradient became the brand colour: you can recognise it on a tiny icon or a giant billboard. Famous gradient logos looks at more examples.

Gradients are harder to own than flat colours because they are easy to approximate, as this one shows. That is the problem Gradiently was built around: a Mark is a gradient and material look with exactly one owner at a time, crafted by Gradiently and checked against every other Mark so no two look alike.

Lesson 5: break the category convention on purpose

Banking has long leaned on blues, which is why the hot coral cards of the UK bank Monzo stood out so quickly. T-Mobile built its identity around magenta in a telecoms market full of blues and reds, and its parent company has defended that magenta in court more than once. If every competitor uses the same colour, choosing a different one is the cheapest distinctiveness available. Colour psychology explains the associations; convention explains why breaking them works.

Applying the lessons to a small brand

1. 1

   List your competitors' colours

   Screenshot ten profiles in your category. The colour that is missing is your opportunity.

2. 2

   Choose a lead colour or a pair

   One colour you will put on everything, or a fixed pair. How to choose brand colours has the full method.

3. 3

   Give the others jobs

   A ground, an ink for text and one accent. The 60 30 10 rule is a useful starting proportion.

4. 4

   Write down the codes

   Hex, RGB, CMYK and a Pantone reference, so every printer and developer gets the same colour. See brand colour codes.

5. 5

   Repeat it for years

   Recognition comes from repetition. Change the words and pictures, not the colours.