Branding
Choosing brand colours that still work at 3am on a phone
Palettes usually fail in the same three places: small text, dark mode and print. How to pick colours that survive all of them.
Colour is chosen in a bright room on a calibrated screen at full size, and then used on a five-year-old phone at half brightness. Most palettes are picked for the first situation and fail in the second.
Pick roles before you pick colours
A working palette is not a set of pretty swatches. It is a set of jobs:
- Ground. The background you will use 90% of the time. Usually near-white or near-black, rarely saturated.
- Ink. The text colour. Needs to hit at least 4.5:1 against the ground at body size.
- Accent. One colour, used sparingly, that means "this is the thing to click".
- Support. One or two quieter tones for surfaces, borders and states.
- Signals. Success, warning, error. These are functional, not decorative, and should not be your brand colours.
Two colours doing clear jobs beat six doing none.
Check contrast before you fall in love
Run every text-on-background pair you intend to use through a contrast checker. Body text wants 4.5:1, large headings 3:1. The colour that fails most often is a mid-tone brand colour used for links on white — it looks correct to the person who chose it and is unreadable to someone with mild low vision, which is a large share of any B2B audience over fifty.
Test in the three places palettes die
- Small. Set your accent as 14px text. Many saturated yellows and light greens disappear.
- Dark. Even if you do not build a dark mode, phones and email clients will invert things for you. Decide what your colours become when they do.
- Print. Bright screen colours are outside CMYK gamut. If you print anything, agree the print equivalent up front rather than discovering it on a proof.
A practical starting shape
One near-neutral ground, one strong ink, one accent, two supports, three signals. Nine values total, each with a written job. That is enough to build an entire company's material and few enough that people remember them.
If you take one rule from this: the accent is a spice, not an ingredient. The moment it appears three times on one screen it stops meaning anything.
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