How to choose brand colors: a step-by-step system

By the 000098 editorial team · Updated October 12, 2026 · 9 min read

A brand palette is more than a favourite color. It is a small system that has to work on a logo, a website, a slide deck, packaging and a social post, for people with and without color vision deficiency. Here is a process that works for startups and established companies alike.

1. Start from positioning, not taste

Write three adjectives the brand should evoke (for example: precise, calm, premium) and list your five closest competitors with their main colors. The goal is a color that fits the adjectives and stands apart from the competitor list. If every competitor is bright blue, a deep navy with a gold accent or a dark green may be more ownable.

2. Pick one primary color

Choose the hue first, then the exact shade. Deep, saturated shades like #000098 give you room to build lighter tints for backgrounds; mid-tones are versatile for buttons; very light colors rarely work as primaries because they fail contrast with white.

3. Add a secondary and an accent

Use a harmony: a complementary or split-complementary accent for calls to action, and an analogous secondary for illustrations and charts. Generate options in the palette generator and lock the primary while you explore.

4. Build tinted neutrals

Pure grays look flat next to a strong brand color. Mix a little of the primary into your darkest text color and your lightest background. Navy brands often use a blue-black for text and a cool off-white for backgrounds.

5. Create scales

Each brand color needs light and dark variants for hover states, backgrounds and borders. A 50–950 scale (as used by Tailwind CSS) is a practical standard. Every color page on 000098 generates one, ready to paste.

6. Test accessibility and context

• Check every text/background pair you plan to use in the contrast checker.
• Run the palette through the color blindness simulator, especially if you rely on red versus green.
• Print a test page; screens and paper differ.
• Place the logo on photos, dark mode and partner co-branding.

7. Document everything

A one-page style guide should list each color's name, role, HEX, RGB, CMYK and any spot-color equivalent from your printer, plus approved pairings and "do not" examples. Store design tokens in code so the website and apps stay in sync.

Need help?

If you would rather have this done for you, our brand color system service delivers a tested palette, tokens and a style guide at a fixed price.

Watch: How to choose your brand colors

Video by its creator on YouTube, embedded for reference. 000098 is not affiliated with the channel.