Identity · 20 October 2026
How to choose a brand colour palette
A brand colour palette is more than a favourite colour. It's primaries, supporting colours, codes and a usage ratio, shown here with Taze Sepet, Pekin Yapı Market and our own identity.
Colour is the first thing people notice about a brand; you’ve registered a logo’s colour before you’ve read a single letter of it. So colour choices often come down to taste: “blue feels trustworthy”, “orange feels energetic”. But a brand palette is more than a colour someone likes. It’s a small system with codes, roles and proportions.
What a palette is made of
Primary colours. One or two colours that identify the brand at a glance, usually the logo’s colours.
Supporting colours. For text, backgrounds and details. They stay quiet.
An accent. A colour used sparingly, on purpose, to pull the eye to one place.
Codes. Each colour written out for screen and print, and for paint where it’s needed, because a red that looks right on a monitor can come back from the printer, or the sign painter, as something else entirely.
A usage ratio. How much of each colour goes on a surface.
Leave out the last two and you’ll watch the palette drift, one print job at a time.
Example: Taze Sepet
Taze Sepet is an online grocery for natural, regional food. Its palette has five colours:
- Fresh Green and Basket Red are the primaries. The green “t” and red “s” in the mark come from them.
- Forest is a deep green, used instead of black for long text.
- Cream is for backgrounds, and Honey is the accent.
All five have HEX, RGB and CMYK codes, and all except Cream have a Pantone reference. Fresh Green, for example, is #78BE20, and Basket Red is #E03C31. The guidelines add a ratio too: white and cream cover just under half of a surface, followed by Forest, green and red. Why bother? Without that ratio, even with exactly the right colours, screens and packaging could slowly turn greener or redder. The guidelines also note that the CMYK and Pantone values are approximate and need checking against a print proof.
Example: Pekin Yapı Market
Pekin’s palette has three colours: Pekin Red, Industrial Black and Pure White. Red carries the energy, black the professionalism, white the clarity.
What stands out here is the number of codes. Pekin Red is defined separately for three surfaces: #CA2027 for screen, RAL 3020 for paint and Pantone 711 C for print. A hardware store’s colour can end up on painted surfaces as well as screens and paper. Without a code for each surface, the same red turns up in three different shades.
Example: our own identity
Kischla’s palette has one accent: a red, #DF2E17. Our rule is to use it once per layout. Everything else is carried by dark and light tones and, where it’s needed, a peach-to-red gradient.
A single-accent rule looks restrictive. It isn’t, really. It makes you decide, page by page, what matters most, and once you’ve decided that, the rest of the layout tends to fall into place.
Questions to ask when you choose
- Does this colour fit what the brand is saying, or was it picked because someone likes it?
- Are most of your competitors using the same colour?
- Can it be reproduced consistently on screen and in print?
- Is there a supporting colour dark enough for text and light enough for backgrounds?
- Is it written down how much of each colour to use?
The palette is one of the core pages of brand guidelines. We walked through the rest in What goes in brand guidelines?