Give Your Colors Jobs
Hello!
Welcome to the first issue of Creative Intelligence, a newsletter about color design, trend strategy, and building meaningful connections between brands and their consumers.
I’m glad you’re here! My mission is to share actionable insights with you each month – tips that support your creative process and help create impactful wins for you and your business.
To kick things off, let’s start with a critical step in designing a successful, functional color palette…
Give Your Colors Jobs
Every color in your palette needs to have a distinct, identifiable purpose. This ensures your palette is not a stand-alone piece of art but has the capacity to drive your brand’s strategy, engagement objectives, and sales goals.
As you design your color palette, these are the questions you need to ask of each color:
1. What will this color achieve?
What role will this color serve for your brand? What need does it fulfill that other colors in your palette currently don’t? What is its purpose?
Any color in your palette needs to reflect the unique personality of your brand, your consumers, and the meaningful space where you two intersect. It needs to incorporate your brand’s strategy, industry, history, and reality. It must go beyond being a forecasted trend color. Each color addition must be dialed to elevate your brand’s individual character, relevance, and market leadership. Each color addition also has a human, marketing, and sales cost – populate your palette with high performers.
2. Who does this color appeal to?
Color is an immediate communicator and the quickest way to emotionally connect with your consumers.
Who will this color speak to – which of your current customers, distribution channels, or targeted areas of growth? Will it appeal to a big enough or valuable enough audience to make its addition worthwhile? What message does it need to send? Make sure you have a clear sense of what each color in your palette is communicating and who it is speaking to. Nail this.
3. What products is this color applicable for?
Look at the products in your line that will get new or additional colors for the season. Does this color make sense for those products – their end-use, materiality, life-cycle, price point?
How often can this color be used? Will it show up frequently enough in the line to adequately convey its message and be worth the investment? In that same vein, how can this color be applied – as an all-over color, combined with multiple other palette hues, only as an accent? Does this justify its value?
4. Is this color a team-player?
Does this color merchandise well with the other colors in your palette? Does it allow you to create sellable color assortments across products? Is it a color workhorse that can be paired with multiple colors in your palette? Does it inject calculated energy into your line?
Color additions should add balance or excitement to your overall palette by working with or off of the other hues.
5. Full-time, part-time, or seasonal?
What kind of commitment are you looking for?
Core color additions need to be foundational, chosen for their ability to merchandise with a wide range of other colors, translate well on the various materials used in your product line, and have sustaining appeal with all or the vast majority of your consumers.
Colors with a longevity of 1-2 years can be more nuanced and chosen specifically to align with the near-future priorities and lifestyles of your consumers. These colors will be the dominant visual communicators of your brand’s ethos, culture, and values.
Seasonal colors are timely, precise storytellers. They are opportunities for your brand, and thus your consumer, to express a potent, captivating emotion.
Take care,
Dawn Rae
I help brands understand what their customers will love and value in the future, and I create the color design + trend strategy to get them there.
I design client-specific seasonal trend forecasts, color palettes, and color merchandising plans. Find a full outline of my services here.
If you are curious about working together, reach out: knoth@dawnrae.com.
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