I love it when I'm working on a project that doesn't already come with brand colors. 1
That means, I could find the perfect color palette for the project. And my hands won't be tied with existing 2
brand colors, and I have a bit more freedom to explore. 3
But often we don't get to choose our own colors. 4
This is good news. 5
If the project comes with good brand colors, but not as much if the colors aren't as nice. 6
How do you know if you have to use brand colors on your website project or not? Easy. 7
If the project already has a logo, that means that you have to use the brand colors. 8
Where do you get the colors from? Directly from the logo. 9
But the best thing to do, is to ask your clients for the style guide or the brand guideline that came 10
with the logo. 11
It looks something like this. 12
This a guide that a logo designer usually provides to the client, whenever they deliver a final logo 13
designs. It will include primary, secondary, and neutral colors. 14
It might also have some guidelines on typography and other brand elements. 15
If such document exists, then you have to stick with the colors and typography 16
provided here. The existence of this guide depends on how much the client was willing to pay and how 17
good of a designer they hired. 18
If they went cheap and got a logo in fiverr, then they might not have a style guide at all. 19
Or if the logo was designed 10 years ago by the owner's nephew, he knew how to click a few buttons on 20
photoshop, then they definitely don't have one. Ugly colors are very difficult to work with, and if the client 21
saved money on logo design, then I can almost always bet that the colors on the logo are going 22
to be terrible. 23
Bad logo designers have a unique skill of time travelling into the past and borrowing colors from the 24
90s. 25
In times like this, I sometimes suggest clients a brand refresh, a color refresh of their brand. 26
They can keep the logo and the shape of the logo. And once I design the website, and we settle on the 27
new color palette, then they can go ahead and refresh the existing logo with the new colors. 28
If that's not possible and the colors are complete junk, then I'll limit the use of their colors on the 29
website, and I will use more neutral colors like whites, greys and blacks. Because they can be used with 30
any color palette. And then use a bit limited options and limited versions of their brand colors. 31
This is a good middle ground between needing to stick with the brand colors, but not using them so 32
much, so they don't make the whole website look terrible.