Any advice on choosing what should be the dominant colour(s) for your start up?

3 points by yasmina 11 years ago | 5 comments

Hi, I am working as a freelance PA for a start-up company that was set up on July 1st and they received a customer after 6 days and they need to have a logo and a professional invoice so that they can get paid properly. The start up is not fully sure on what they are looking for in a logo as they wasn't planning on getting a logo designed for another 1-2 months. In short, does anyone have any good advice or experience in choosing what should be the dominant color(s) for their start up? (The start-up has spent a few hours thinking about it and has come up with 2 alternatives: Red, Black & White or Brown & Yellow. But the company is worried that they don't have any robust reasoning or logic to back up these suggestions). I am hoping somebody else on this forum may have been through a similar experience and can offer some advice.

tortoises 11 years ago |

Have the start-up write down all the attributes they want their product to have. If you were selling magnificent trained wolves, for instance, you would want the customer to think, upon seeing the wolves: "What proud, mysterious, noble, cunning, ruthless, snow-dappled, and primeval creatures." You would neither want nor expect the customer to generate such adjectives if you were selling, for instance, hamsters.

At that juncture I would repair to a high mountain top, away from the start-up client, one hand lazily petting the head of my fearsome trained wolf, as I mused to myself on the adjectives I had just collected. What colors would they inspire? What noises, what textures, what tastes? I would write all these down in a second list.

Then I would descend back to the company of my human friends and ask people not in the start-up what the second list made them think of, as a cross-check against the first. If you start off with "petwolfco: proud, mysterious, ruthless, loyal", and come back from the mountain with "petwolfco: confetti colors, Comic Sans, merry polka music, Shirley Temples", you had better go back to the top of the mountain to reflect some more.

When my impulses and my third party's impulses at last concurred ("petwolfco: grey, ragged, minimalistic, narrow sans-serif, stunning small highlights in stunning blood red"), I would craft my new logo, working all through the night into the early dawn. As the sun rose pink and gold over the sleeping world, I would deliver that logo into the hands of my start-up client in the form of an extremely high resolution image they could shrink down later if needed. The start-up would gasp in marveling wonder, and clutch the SVG file gratefully to its chest. My pet wolf would nod gravely, and we would stalk wordlessly back into the mountains.

wtracy 11 years ago |

Advice from someone who has thought about the problem but doesn't necessarily have any clue what he's talking about:

First, spend some time Googling "color and emotions" and "color and behavior". Think about how you want the customer to react to the brand.

Next, I would consider A/B testing it. :-) I'm guessing that's not a good option in your case, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway.

dayv 11 years ago |

Try this page. It has a lot of various color palettes that can maybe give you some inspiration. http://www.colourlovers.com/

2ndgreen 11 years ago | |

take a look at this one as well: http://startupsavant.com/business-logo-colors

its basic approach to coloring - nothing too deterministic

joeclark77 11 years ago |

IMHO, you can't focus-group and statistically analyze everything. If your entrepreneurs can't even be allowed to pick their own favorite colors, for fear of making a sub-market-optimal decision, then why bother even going into business for themselves? I'd tell them that you're going to go with hot pink and hunter orange unless they give you other instructions by the end of the day.