The Complete Guide to Color Psychology

As a small business owner, you’re juggling countless responsibilities with limited time and resources. With 52 other more pressing tasks on your to-do list, considering the strategic use of color is probably at the bottom— if it made the list at all. 

However, with the right research, color psychology is one of the most powerful and accessible marketing choices you can make. The right color choices can evoke specific emotions, strengthen brand recognition, and influence purchasing decisions.

This guide provides a foundational understanding of what you need to know about color theory and how you can use the principles to help your business stand out.

Color psychology studies how different hues impact human behavior, emotions, and perception, but it doesn’t involve rigid rules. 

For example, red generally increases energy while blue promotes calm. However, a red that feels energizing in a fitness studio might have a more aggressive ambiance when used in a doctor’s office. 

Colors create context that subtly shapes how we experience brands and their messaging. 

By recognizing that colors create psychological environments– but they don’t trigger automatic responses– you can make strategic choices about using color in your branding. The most effective approach to color psychology is digging deep into your audience and their background, then using color to create meaningful connections with your customers. 

Four colors are most frequently used in branding: red, blue, green, and yellow. Each one has distinct psychological associations that can strengthen or undermine your brand positioning, depending on how you use them.

Studies show that red increases heart rate, physiological arousal, and emotional intensity. 

Red demands immediate attention. To communicate excitement, energy, and urgency, include it in your branding. 

Red can encourage impulse decisions, making it popular for advertising sales and discounts. Notice how your eye is immediately drawn to the sale items?

You can find red in branding for:

• restaurants (Coca-Cola and Chick-fil-A)
• entertainment (YouTube and ESPN)
• automotive businesses

Red’s meaning varies significantly across cultures, making it critical to consider your target audience’s perception of the color. In many Asian cultures, red represents luck, wealth, and long life. However, in the Middle East, red is used to represent danger and caution. 

What is the most relaxing color? Most people would agree blue— the color of a sunny day and the gently rolling ocean. 

If red accelerates emotions, blue slows them down, encouraging feelings of hope, stability, and professionalism. Research shows that blue increases trust more than red and helps to reduce anxiety. Blue’s association with water also creates perceptions of cleanliness.

Blue is often used for:

• financial services (Visa and PayPal)
• SaaS businesses (Salesforce)
• tech companies (IBM and Microsoft)

[maybe include a row of blue brands: IBM, HP, intel, goldman sachs, chase, visa, dell, philips, lowes]

In almost every culture, blue is associated with positive experiences or feelings, making it a safe choice for companies that plan on expanding to multiple continents.

Science says that out of all the colors, green is easiest on our eyes. It’s probably why it’s one of the easiest colors to create a diverse palette. This fact alone makes it an ideal choice to take up a lot of space in your branding. 

In most Western countries, green indicates growth, health, and eco-friendliness. It has strong associations with nature, so people connect the color to vitality and renewal. 

Businesses that typically include green in their branding include:

• wellness brands (Humana and Aetna)
• organic food companies (Whole Foods)
• sustainable businesses (Starbucks)
• agriculture companies (John Deere)

Because Western cultures are increasingly emphasizing sustainability and wellness, green is growing in popularity as a brand color. Green doesn’t always have such positive associations, though. 

In China and Indonesia, the color green often represents infidelity. In South America, green is considered the color of death. 

A cheery yellow communicates optimism, happiness, and affordability. That’s why Mailchimp uses a bright yellow, according to the former CEO Ben Chestnut. “We selected it [yellow] because we wanted to signal that email marketing could be approachable and even fun at a time when most marketing software felt intimidatingly technical.”

You may find it best to use yellow in small doses, especially if you struggle with design. It’s a color of extremes.

A little bit of yellow boosts concentration, but too much results in visual fatigue. Yellow attracts attention but can seem cheap if it’s not used well. 

Yellow works well for:

• family-friendly brands (Cheerios)
• educational resources (National Geographic)
• budget-friendly options (IKEA)
• youth-focused brands (Snapchat)

In reality, color associations are mainly learned behaviors that develop over time through repeated exposure and cultural context.

When we see the same colors used over and over in specific situations—like red for clearance sales or blue for corporate websites—our brains form connections that feel intuitive but are actually created through our experiences. This is why color meanings can vary so much across different cultures and industries.

Paul Rand, the legendary designer who created the iconic logos for IBM, ABC, and UPS, explains it this way: “I didn’t choose blue for IBM because blue means ‘trust’ in some generic color psychology chart. I chose it because it was appropriate, distinctive, and created the right psychological context for a company established in computing. A color becomes meaningful through consistent application and association, not through inherent properties.”

You don’t necessarily need to follow generalized color meanings, but create your own color associations. What matters most is how your chosen colors align with your brand personality, resonate with your audience, and differentiate you from your competitors. 

Mistakes in color combinations for your branding can tank your sales and push potential customers away before they even realize why. Avoid these common design pitfalls as you design your own color scheme. 

There’s a comfort in following industry trends— blue for finance, green for health products, red for clearance sales. But this comfort can come at a steep price, because our brains are wired to notice what’s different, not what’s familiar. 

In his book Pour Your Heart Into It, Howard Schultz remarks that the iconic Starbucks green was a “deliberate choice to represent a different kind of coffee experience. The deep green connected to our Seattle roots and the natural environment, but it also represented something unique in a coffee landscape dominated by browns and burgundies. We wanted to signal that Starbucks wasn’t just another coffee shop—it was a third place between work and home.”

Other designers and marketers have taken a similar approach to help their brand avoid falling into the “what everyone else is doing” trap.

When Andrew Wilkinson was hired to design a new team chat app, he decided to go a different route than the common blues and greys of other enterprise software. Instead, he started with a logo that looked “like a confetti cannon had gone off. Electric blue, yellows, purples, and greens all over.” We know it now as—

It wasn’t just a colorful logo, either. Stewart Butterfield, the former CEO of Slack, shares, ​​”We chose that specific aubergine purple because it stood out dramatically in the enterprise software landscape, which was dominated by blues. We wanted something that felt different—professional but not corporate, distinctive but not frivolous.”

Because so much about color theory depends on context, you need a thorough understanding of your audience to determine how they will perceive a color. Generic choices won’t resonate on a personal level or contribute to brand recognition and growth.

Finding out how your target audience will respond to various colors is all about the research.

• Use surveys, questionnaires, social media polls, and focus groups to ask your audience directly. 
• Use A/B testing to evaluate different color schemes on your website or social ads by measuring engagement.
• When you’re analyzing your competitors, mine the reviews to look for mentions of visual appeal.

Approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are colorblind. Altogether, that accounts for 4.5% of the population. Without enough contrast between your background and text, some of your audience won’t be able to access your website and social media content. 

Foregoing accessibility won’t just cost you sales— it can even cost you court fees. Just ask Domino’s Pizza, which was sued over site accessibility by a blind man unable to order food on the website, even when using his screen reader. 

You don’t have to have a background in design to build a striking color palette. Here are a few practical strategies to help you create your brand’s unique visual identity.

If you’re unsure where to begin when choosing your color scheme, consider these tried and true methods of combining colors. 

• Monochromatic schemes use variations of a single color by adjusting brightness and saturation. Think of the various shades available on a single paint strip. 

Until transitioning to their all-black logo last year, PayPal paired two shades of blue for a monochromatic approach.

Saturday Skin uses a gradient of pinks on their website and in their packaging system.

• Complementary combinations pair colors from opposite sides of the color wheel. They create maximum contrast, so you might choose one as a primary brand color and another as an accent color for buttons. 

For example, Tide uses complementary colors blue and orange for an eye-catching logo design. 

Ritual Vitamins uses a similar combination of yellow and blue, differentiating themselves from the greens commonly used in wellness products. 

• Analogous schemes use colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel. The result is a cohesive feel. 

A perfect example is the shades of green and yellow seen in the BP logo.

Accessible color choices improve the user experience, which can also improve your engagement metrics. 

Use the WebAIM Contrast Checker to verify your color combinations and ensure adequate contrast. The Coblis simulator shows how your color selections appear to people with color blindness. 

Look to well-established brands to see how they ensure accessibility while staying true to their brand colors. In Slack’s brand guidelines, the company details what their accessible colors are and when they should be used—

Start with one anchor color that represents your core brand values. From there, digital color wheel tools let you experiment with different combinations and automatically generate harmonious palettes that go along with your first color choice. 

Choose a primary color for 60% of your design elements, a complementary or analogous color for 30%, and an accent color for the remaining 10%. You can see how Starbucks puts this principle to work in their brand color guide. 

Pre-made templates provide professional-looking color combinations. Even if you don’t use the template, you can gather inspiration from the colors the designer chose for that industry or product. 

Many platforms also offer color palettes designed for different industries and emotional tones. Resources like this guide on the best classic color palette combinations suggest classic color combos and how they can best be used. 

With Piktochart, you can also choose from suggested color schemes to apply a set of colors to your entire visual in one click. They’re designer-created color palettes, at your fingertips and ready for application.

What looks great on a computer screen may not look as good in person, and vice versa. Test your colors on multiple devices and in different lighting conditions to ensure consistency no matter where your colors are used. 

You may need to research the name of your chosen hue in different settings. For example, Unicef’s brand book emphasizes their primary color and suggests when to use each color model to achieve the same color.

With the right approach, your brand colors can influence the way customers feel about your brand before they even read a word. By understanding the psychology of colors– especially the way colors work in context– even the most left-brained of us can create a brand color palette we’re proud of.

Our AI design generator makes picking the right color combinations effortless— no design background required. Just choose your template and provide a few words about the content you need. Piktochart AI does the rest. 

Start creating in just seconds.