Brand colors are not isolated decoration. They serve two purposes at the same time: conveying brand attributes and influencing user behavior in different scenarios. On official websites and in marketing materials, the emphasis of these two purposes is not the same.
First, Understand What Color Does
Color directly affects emotions through vision. Highly saturated warm colors easily attract attention and are suitable for positions that require action; cool colors convey stability and trustworthiness and are suitable for core information that needs to build trust. In addition, the order in which people process visual information is roughly color, graphics, and text, which means that reasonable contrast can significantly increase the speed at which information is recognized.
Official Website: Restraint and Stability
The official website is the permanent home of a brand's digital image and needs to carry a sense of professionalism, so the overall color scheme tends toward restraint.
The primary color should occupy most of the page area, and its brightness and saturation should be appropriately reduced to avoid visual pressure caused by long browsing. Secondary colors handle interactive functions such as navigation and buttons, and maintain sufficient difference from the primary color to ensure that clickable elements can be recognized at a glance. White space is also part of the color scheme; leaving appropriate gaps between information blocks gives the page a sense of breathing room.
Stability is also important. Brand primary colors should not be changed frequently; annual trend colors are better used as accent touches rather than becoming the new primary color.
Marketing Scenarios: Eye-Catching and Focused
Social platforms and ad creatives are faced with rapid scrolling, and the primary task of color is to grab attention. Higher-saturation variants can be used in this scenario to make the visual jump out in the feed. Gradient colors have been used relatively often in marketing materials in recent years, but their angle and range need to be controlled, otherwise they can easily look cluttered.
Marketing materials usually also need attention to their display effect in dark environments. The proportion of nighttime browsing is not low, and contrast needs to be confirmed separately.
A Set of Actionable Steps
First, return to the brand itself, extract core attributes, and determine the hue direction based on them, rather than picking a color first and then thinking of a reason. Second, break down requirements by scenario and establish the correspondence between colors and functions—which colors are used in which positions on the official website, and which colors are used in which positions in marketing materials. Third, conduct readability verification to confirm that text is still clear under conditions such as low light and color vision differences. Fourth, form written guidelines that specify the color values and scope of use in each scenario, ensuring that materials made by different people are consistent.
Several Common Misconceptions
First, the more colors, the better. Too many primary colors weaken recognizability; usually a structure of "one primary, two secondary, one accent" is already enough. Second, being led by popular trends and changing the primary color every year actually makes the brand image blurrier. Third, ignoring regional differences: the same color may have completely different meanings in different markets, and brands targeting overseas markets need to verify this additionally.
Turning color from a choice based on feeling into evidence-based, reusable rules is one of the signs that brand visual identity is maturing.