Colour psychology in logos: choosing a brand colour palette

Colour psychology is the study of how colour affects what people feel and think. For logos, the honest answer is that colour does carry meaning, but less of it, and less universally, than the popular charts suggest. Blue does not make a bank trustworthy, and green does not make a juice healthy. What a colour says depends on culture, on context and on the colours next to it.

So treat brand colour (or color, if you search in American English) as a decision in three parts. Choose colours that set you apart and fit the brief. Give each colour a job in the palette. Then prove it: contrast for reading, exact values for print and screen, and tests on real applications.

Below I cover what the research supports, how meaning shifts with context, notes for the Arab market, building a palette with roles, accessibility, print versus screen, and testing, with examples from my projects. Colour is one part of a larger system, which the brand identity guide covers in full.

What the research supports, and what it does not

Most colour meaning charts online are lists of associations without sources. The research is more careful.

• Colour matters, but the science is young. In a 2014 review in the Annual Review of Psychology, Andrew Elliot and Markus Maier concluded that colour can carry meaning and affect how people feel, think and behave. They also wrote that the field is at an early stage, and that much more work is needed before strong recommendations for practice are justified.
• Shade matters as much as hue. Lauren Labrecque and George Milne, in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2012), linked hues to brand personality traits and showed that saturation and lightness can strengthen or change those traits. A pale blue and a deep navy do not say the same thing.
• Associations are shared, and also local. A study of colour and emotion across 30 countries, published in Psychological Science in 2020 by Domicele Jonauskaite and colleagues, found broad patterns that people share worldwide. But the country still shaped the answers, and countries close in language or geography answered more alike.

In practice: associations are real but soft. Be wary of confident figures about how much of a buying decision colour controls. They are often repeated without a study you can trace.

Meaning depends on context

Culture

The same colour can mean celebration in one place and mourning in another. Even inside one country, a colour means different things in a mosque, a hospital and a sports stadium. Design for the audience you actually serve, not for a global chart.

The shelf and the feed

Colour helps recognition most when it differs from the neighbours. If every clinic in your city is blue and white, a new blue clinic disappears. Before choosing, collect your competitors' colours on one page and look for the gap.

Shade, finish and partners

A colour is never seen alone. Saturation, lightness, the colours beside it and even the finish (matte, gloss, foil) change its tone. This table is a starting point for discussion, not a rulebook:

Colour notes for the Arab market

General notes, to handle with care rather than as rules:

• Green is linked with Islam, with nature and, in Saudi Arabia, with the flag. That makes it powerful and also crowded. For the Book & Technology Fair in Saudi Arabia, the second identity direction was a green shield in the colours of the kingdom, which tied a national event to its place. For a café or a software company, the same green would need its own reason.
• Gold reads as value, celebration and generosity, and it is everywhere in Ramadan and Eid. For Al-Furqan, a platform for teaching the Holy Quran, the identity uses gold for reverence and green for growth. Gold works best as a measured accent: when everything is gold, nothing is special.
• Black can mean formality, luxury or mourning, depending on the setting. In the Gulf it is also part of everyday dress, so it carries no single fixed mood.
• White suggests cleanliness and calm, which is why it is common in healthcare. It still needs a partner colour to become recognisable.
• Flag colours. Many Arab flags share red, white, black and green. Put those four together and the design will read as national, whether you meant it or not.

Ramadan, Eid and national days

Seasons change how the whole market looks: night blues, lantern gold and crescents in Ramadan, flag colours around national days. A brand can join the season without losing itself. Keep the logo, type and layout, and add a seasonal layer of colour and imagery.

National symbols have rules. In Saudi Arabia, the flag law forbids using the flag as a trademark or in commercial advertising, and printing it on items that are meant to be thrown away. The Ministry of Interior has repeated these rules around National Day in recent years. So a National Day campaign can borrow the green, but should not print the flag on a paper cup. Other countries have their own rules, so check them before using any national symbol.

Build the palette by roles

A palette is not a set of favourite colours. Each colour needs a job:

Most of any layout should be neutral, a good share the main colour, and only a little accent. When the accent appears everywhere, it stops pointing at anything.

Examples from my work

• Abdeen Coffee. The published palette is Abdeen green, a leaf green, lime, a warm cream and a coffee brown, and the project page shows colour trials before the chosen palette. The hand-drawn lettering carries the heritage, and the colour system stays simple so it prints cleanly in one colour or four. It maps neatly onto roles: green as the main colour, lime as the accent, cream as the ground and coffee brown as a natural text colour.
• Rawnaq Medical Group. A family of three brands in Riyadh. Each mark is drawn from a flowing Arabic letter and set in the same type, and each brand takes its own colour: teal for the group and training, a fresh green for skin care. Shape and type hold the family together; colour tells the brands apart.
• Family Life. On this snack and bread packaging, every flavour owns a colour, the product photography is big and the name is loud, so the range reads from across the aisle. Here colour works as navigation.
• Kababgy Al-Sultan. The maroon and orange come straight from the coals of the grill. The colour comes from the brand's own story, not from a chart.

Contrast: the part you can measure

Meaning is soft, but readability is not. The W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2, a W3C Recommendation since December 2024) set clear minimums:

• 4.5:1 contrast between normal text and its background.
• 3:1 for large text, which WCAG defines as at least 18 point, or 14 point bold.
• 3:1 for icons, chart lines and interface parts that people need in order to understand the page.
• Text in a logo is exempt. The text around the logo is not.
• Colour must not be the only signal. A red error and a green success also need an icon or a word, because many people cannot tell those two colours apart easily.

Here is what that looks like with the published Abdeen values, calculated with the WCAG formula. Any online contrast checker will give the same numbers:

A palette can look perfect on a moodboard and still fail on the first menu or price list. Checking each pair early prevents that.

Arabic needs extra margin. The dots that separate letters such as ب ت ث, and the thin joins between letters, are the first details to disappear at low contrast. For small Arabic text, aim well above the minimum.

Print and screen: one colour, several codes

One brand colour needs several definitions, because screens mix light and printing presses mix ink:

• HEX and RGB for screens, websites and apps.
• CMYK for ordinary four-colour print.
• Pantone spot colours for an exact, repeatable colour, mixed as its own ink. Pantone marks its colours C for coated paper and U for uncoated, because the same ink looks noticeably different on each.

Three practical points:

1. Bright colours may not print. Vivid limes, greens and oranges often sit outside what CMYK can reproduce. If your main colour is one of them, decide early whether the print budget allows a spot colour.
2. Gold and silver are special. They need metallic ink or foil in print. On screen, a flat or gently shaded stand-in has to be defined separately.
3. Do not trust automatic conversion. Match the values by eye on a printed proof, on the real paper or material, then write every code into the guide. The brand guidelines article shows how to document them.

Test the palette on real applications

A swatch is not a brand. Before approving a palette, test it where people will meet it:

1. Beside competitors. Put your shelf, sign or feed next to theirs. Do you stand out?
2. Without colour. The mark should work in black, white and one colour first. That is part of designing a logo properly; colour comes after.
3. Small. Profile picture, app icon and favicon.
4. Real content. A menu, a price list, a form and an error message.
5. On a phone outdoors, and in dark mode.
6. On a printed proof, on the real paper, fabric or packaging.
7. Through a colour-blindness view. Photoshop and Illustrator both include colour-blindness proofing.
8. In season. A Ramadan post and a National Day post should still look like you.

For the Book & Technology Fair, both directions were presented with full sets of applications, from walls and roll-ups to badges and phone screens. The client judged the green on the places it would live, not as a swatch on a white slide.

Conclusion

Colour psychology gives you useful questions, not fixed answers. Start from the brief and the competitors, choose a colour you can own, give every colour a role, and then measure what can be measured: contrast, print values and real applications. That is how a palette stays both meaningful and usable.

If you want a colour system that works on the shelf, the screen and the sign, start a project here.