Find Out The Importance of Colour in Branding & The Real Truth About Colour Theory
When developing a brand, consistency is key! Ensuring your logo, typography, tone and feel are aligned across your branding efforts.
Colour is the backbone of your brand consistency, providing your audience with a massive initial response based upon the connotations and their relationship with that colour.
Join us as we delve into the theory behind colours, the importance of colour within brands and examples of colour schemes and complementary colours.
What is Colour Theory?
Let’s not beat around the bush and dive straight into the concept of colour theory!
Essentially, colour theory is the science of colour. It’s all about how colours interact with one another, how we interpret colour, and how different colours signify different things to different individuals.
From a branding and graphic design perspective, colour affects the way a brand engages with and presents itself to its audience.
“Look around you right now, what brands do you see? Why do you think they have chosen that colour alongside that typoygraphy?”
Take Pepsi for example. During the ongoing branding process, Pepsi has had to differentiate itself from the iconic branding offered by Coca-Cola. The red, white, and blue design in a sphere-like shape clearly distinguishes itself from Coca-Cola while retaining the impact.
Did you know colour can boost brand recognition by up to 80%? This, therefore, makes it far easier for potential customers can see you apart in a busy market. This theory applies across industries, whether online or on a shelf.

Colour Schemes
At the Strohacker Design School, we teach the importance of colour within brands extensively. This is because we see the value of colour within a brand’s identity.
A colour scheme is a collection of colours used in many creative and design situations. Colour schemes are employed to generate style and appeal, and they are an important component of brand identity.
A fundamental and usually default colour scheme in web design is, for example, the use of a white background with black text. This is because it allows for easy reading of the text and is associated with reading off a physical page.
Not every brand uses only one colour. Consider the golden arches of McDonald’s and the use of red and yellow, or even Microsoft’s red, green, yellow, and blue extracted from Windows.
Recent trends have seen iconic logos have colour stripped away entirely, with the use of white logos to contrast the bright colours used in advertising. This is commonly seen within Digital Marketing efforts, most commonly with media and video advertising.
Learn More About Colour Theory
If you are looking to put theory into practice, why not book yourself onto a Strohacker Design School graphic design course?
Throughout our courses, we will learn and apply the theories of colour and build logos, branding guidelines and self-branding. These skills will then be applied to live briefs within different creative industries.
With full-time, part-time and online courses available, you can start building your graphic design career today!