Building a colour palette that survives the real world
Process
By Ali
Colour is where identities most often fail quietly. The palette looks beautiful in the presentation and then the first print run comes back muddy, or the website looks nothing like the shop sign.
Start with the materials
Before we pick a single colour, we collect the surfaces the brand will live on: the bag, the box, the menu card, the screen. A saffron yellow on white coated paper is a very different colour on brown kraft.
Checking printed swatches against the screen.Fewer colours, more roles
Most strong palettes have one hero colour, one or two supporting colours and a set of neutrals. We give every colour a job — background, text, accent, signal — and write the job into the guidelines, so nobody uses the accent as a background by accident.
Test in bad conditions
We print on the cheapest paper the client might use, look at the website on an old phone in sunlight and photograph the sign at night. If the palette still holds together, it is ready.