writing a color story - how i wrote mine and how you can write yours!
You guyyyys I’m so excited about this post. It’s v helpful, v informative, and v long. So get cozy and please please please tell me how it helped you!
super small intro to Color Psychology
Colors work differently than words and images. We feel them before we see them. They work at a subconscious level by creating an emotive and instinctive gut response. By understanding how color psychology works, you can write a brand color story that feels as good as it looks.
When a new brand or image is presented, we feel the colors, see the fonts, and hear the words. When we see the fonts and hear the words, they are either confirming or denying what the color story is communicating. Knowing the feelings that colors evoke and how those feelings affect the way people perceive your brand will make all the difference.
When I look at a brand’s feed - whether it be a lash artist, trainer or company - I immediately notice the colors, then any words or images. If you pay attention, you probably do too. This is because that is the order our eyes and brain take things in and process information. As a fun exercise, I like to look at a website or a brand and then close my eyes and listen for the first words that come to mind, and wait to see what I feel. If the colors have been chosen right and everything has been put together cohesively, you should think of the words and feel the feelings that represent the brand.
Studies have shown that colors have a direct impact on our mood. I have a separate post about this later, so I won't go into it now, but colors can literally change how we’re feeling, often without us even realizing it.
Intro to A Color Story
Have you ever looked at an Instagram feed and thought, “wow, why does this feel more cohesive than the normal brand?” Maybe you couldn’t quite put your finger on it but it seemed to go beyond only using its brand colors and fonts. Whether you realized it or not, you were awed by the color story happening before your eyes.
The first time I was introduced to the concept of a “color story” was around 2012 when Instagram started to become more popular. I remember looking at Lauren Conrad’s personal feed and loving the way every photo seemed to work together cohesively. It felt designed. This was a breath of fresh “social media air” for me. Around that time, everyone else was using the Nashville & Clarendon filters and the PicStitch app and every feed looked the same. Once I saw a feed with a color story, I started seeing this design style become more popular on Instagram and I was here for it. Over the years, it has only been refined and become a professional-looking way to design your feed with many top brands designing this way. It has also become a profitable business for bloggers who sell those popular presets you can apply to all your photos. Why? Because they’re easy and they work. They communicate the feelings or mood you’re wanting to sell… instantly. When you encounter a feed that has a color story - OR clearly doesn’t - it makes you feel a type of way:
How chaotic does my early days feed feel?? It makes me cringe haha. Nowadays it isn’t a TON better, but man I am so happy our social media aesthetic has evolved as humans LOL.
I found this at the same time I was writing this blog and LOL’d cuz it described it so perfectly! Though our aesthetic has evolved, some of these extra add-ons have complicated it all a bit, amirite?
A message that lands
Avoiding a conflicting message is so important. If your words contradict your colors or vice versa, something will feel off. All parts have to work harmoniously in order to be “on brand.” If any part is off, it can break trust and most likely your viewer won’t necessarily know why - they’ll just be confused. Your images, words, fonts, colors, etc all need to work together in harmony.
When it came to choosing the colors for my brand, it was important that they told the story I wanted them to tell. The first question I asked myself was, “what feelings do I want my colors to evoke?” Your color story should play into the emotions you want your target audience (ideal client) to associate with your brand. If my name - Reverie Beauty Co - essentially means to daydream and wonder about beauty, I knew I couldn’t pick hot pink and teal because they wouldn’t tell the story of a whimsical, ethereal brand and they surely wouldn’t attract my ideal client.
The feelings I wanted to communicate, and words I wanted associated with my brand are those you see in this post’s photo: “daydream, wonder, inspire, awe” and “ethereal, refined, peaceful and organic.” I knew it was important that the colors I picked told the story of these words. You don’t have to know color psychology through and through, you just need to know that you need to use color theory when you are picking your colors.
Since my ideal client is a professional who wants - and oftentimes needs - a more natural look, I wanted colors to feel earthy, toned-down, confident, zen. If you design your brand more to please your colleagues or showcase your own personality than you do to attract a profitable and ideal client, you will miss out on one of the key ways to gain the right kind of draw and attention from your ideal clients.
How you can write yours
When you’re building your brand, one of the very first things you should do is write out your brand values. From there you can find the words to describe your vibe (my vibe words are the ones I just listed above) and the colors will almost pick themselves. You never want to choose colors first, then write out your brand values. If you do that, you’ll likely end up picking your personal favorite colors, which often don’t represent the kind of brand you want and need to build.
If you want to be a bit more visual about it, create a Pinterest board and pin photos that represent anything close to what you’d love your brand to look like. A good place to start is to take one of the words you picked to describe your brand, then add a color you think you want to take the direction of your brand color palette. Example: “sophisticated mauve.” If you search “mauve” alone, you’ll get a lot of pantone swatches and a bunch of blocks of color. When I searched both terms however, the “sophisticated mauve” results were much more editorial.
Another tip is to add “aesthetic” at the end of your search. Example: “dreamy orange beach aesthetic.” Without adding “aesthetic,” the results for “dreamy orange beach” were not nearly as visually pleasing. These are basically just ways to help narrow down your search and hopefully spend less time in the Pinterest twilight zone time-suck.
From the results of your search, start pinning photos of interior design, nature, fashion, art, etc. Once you have a decent amount pinned, use an eye dropper tool to pick out specific colors. You can do this in Photoshop, or an easier way is to use this online tool.
Simply take a screenshot of your whole Pinterest board and upload it to that website. To take a screenshot on a Mac, (sorry PC users, you’re gonna have to google how to do this) press Command, Shift, 4, then let go. Using your cursor, press down and draw a box, or square, around the area you want the screenshot of and let go again. It will save to your desktop. Upload that photo to the color picker website:
You’ll notice that it automatically pulls colors from the screenshot of your Pinterest board AND when you click on the color, it will display the HEX code, plus its other color codes in the black box to the left! Score! Even better, you can click on any area or color in the image, and it will tell you its exact HEX code, wherever you click. WOW - did I lose you at “HEX” code?? That all sounded v technical. Not to fear - my branding guide will cover all of this too! In short, all colors have different codes depending where they’re being used (digitally, printed, painted, etc) and they don’t always match exactly or convert equally between codes. For online purposes, knowing the HEX code is key for nailing down your brand colors. In fact, this is the code you enter into Canva and can save in your Brand Kit so that each time you use Canva, you know you’re using your exact brand colors.
With the screenshot of your Pinterest board and using the tool from the Image Color Picker site, you can now create a brand identity mockup (below) in Canva! There are so many color variations from this mockup alone, that you are sure to find the perfect colors for your brand. Make sure you save the HEX codes from the color picker site and put them somewhere safe (I use the Notes app in my phone), or save them directly into your Canva brand kit. Now you’re ready to use them for all your projects!
*HEX codes for these colors, from left to right: #d09755, #2f474b, #ceb3af, #78432f, #d1cfd2
The Formula
One thing that I had a hard time deciding once I finalized my color palette, was picking which colors would be my “main” brand colors and which would act as more of a support. Below is the formula I used when I built out my brand. It can really help you know how to properly use your colors throughout your brand elements, like your website, stationary, patterns, etc.
1-2 MAIN COLORS | 1-3 NEUTRAL COLORS | 1-2 ACCENT COLORS
THE MAIN COLORS: These are simply the main colors that represent your brand. Mine are the muted sage and gray/taupe you see below. On the color wheel, they are complementary colors, but your main colors don’t have to be. These should be your first choice when choosing color for your site details, print materials, etc. These are used for backgrounds on my site, for stationery pieces, my logo, and so on.
THE NEUTRAL COLORS: These are the colors that help pull it all together. They serve as a grounding color. Maybe it’s a creamy beige to add warmth to the brand, an off-white, etc. They can be used as text on a dark background or the colors for your patterns or textures.
THE ACCENT COLORS: These are the colors that will support your main colors. For me, I have the toned-down terra cotta and the warmer charcoal below. These can be a button, an announcement sticker, a heading text, or a highlighter text (if you use your cursor to copy text from anywhere on my site, it highlights as the terra cotta color!).
Truth be told, I still waver back and forth between swapping the spots of my terra cotta and my sage colors. Either are a great main color option. Right now though, keeping them in the roles they’re in makes sense for a dreamier vibe for my brand.
A puzzle needs every piece to be complete
As this series continues, we’ll be covering so much more than just colors and fonts. But in an aesthetic industry like ours, we can’t pretend that the visual components of a brand aren’t a big part of it. I hear a lot of people say, “fonts and colors don’t matter, what matters is what you say and how you say it.” While I do agree that what you say and how you say it is very important, it is not always more important. Business coaches and marketing teams that you hire are doing you a disservice if that’s their approach. Every piece of a brand’s identity is equally important - particularly in a creative & visual industry like the lash industry. Approaching a brand strategy and story holistically, produces inimitable results. When all parts are working together cohesively, you can do more with so much less.
Have you chosen your brand colors? Did you think about your ideal client when you were choosing your colors? Do you know who your ideal client is? Do you need help with your colors? I’m curious to know what your process was (or maybe still is) when you were writing your color story.
Let me know in the comments or reach out on Insta!