Brand Colours

The roles in a brand colour palette

Role	Purpose	Typical number
Primary	The colour most associated with the brand: logo, key surfaces, main buttons	1 to 2
Secondary	Supports the primary in layouts, charts and illustrations	2 to 4
Accent	Draws attention to one element, such as an offer or a call to action	1 to 2
Neutrals	Text, backgrounds and borders: usually a dark, a white and several greys	3 to 5
Functional	Success, warning, error and information states in software and forms	3 to 4

A palette also needs proportions. A rule of thumb many designers use is 60-30-10: about 60% dominant or neutral colour, 30% secondary, 10% accent.

Specifying each colour

A colour picked on screen is not yet specified. Screens, printing presses and paint produce colour in different ways, so each brand colour needs a value for each reproduction method:

System	Used for	What to know
HEX and RGB	Screens: web, apps, slides, video	Values are assumed to be in sRGB, the colour space defined by IEC 61966-2-1:1999 for monitors and the web. HEX is the same RGB value written in hexadecimal: #047DBA is RGB 4, 125, 186.
CMYK	Four-colour process printing	The result depends on press, paper and ink. Give values per print condition (coated and uncoated paper at least), ideally with the ICC profile used for the conversion.
Pantone (PMS)	Spot colour printing, packaging, merchandise	The Pantone Matching System numbers premixed inks. The suffix gives the paper: C for coated, U for uncoated.
RAL or paint references	Signage, vehicles, interiors, trade show stands	Needed whenever the colour is painted or powder-coated rather than printed.

Two mistakes are common. The first is converting the screen colour to CMYK with a formula and treating the result as final. Many saturated screen colours, bright blues and greens especially, are outside the range a four-colour press can print, so the converted value prints duller. Choose the print value deliberately, and match screen and print versions by eye on real proofs. The second is giving one Pantone reference for all paper: a brand that prints on coated and uncoated stock often needs a separate uncoated reference to look the same.

Contrast and accessibility

A brand colour used for text, buttons or icons has to be readable. WCAG 2.2, a W3C Recommendation published in October 2023, sets minimum contrast ratios between text or interface elements and their background:

Content	Level AA	Level AAA
Normal text	4.5:1	7:1
Large text (at least 18 point, or 14 point bold)	3:1	4.5:1
Icons, input borders and other graphical objects needed to understand the page	3:1	Not defined

The ratio compares the relative luminance of the two colours and runs from 1:1 (identical colours) to 21:1 (black on white). Logos and text that is part of a logo are exempt, but a brand colour used for body text, links or button labels is not. Mid-tone oranges, light blues and yellows often fail with white text, so many palettes add a darker shade of the primary for text and buttons.

In the EU, the European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) has applied since 28 June 2025 to many consumer-facing digital services. Check every text and background pair before the palette is approved, not after the website is built.

Brand colours in day-to-day work

Most colour errors come from people who did not have the values at hand. A sales team builds charts in a slide template whose theme colours were never set. A distributor prints a banner from a screen file, and the brand blue comes out purple. A designer picks a colour from a compressed JPG of the logo and gets a value a few steps off. The fix is to put the exact values where people work: in slide and document templates, in a swatch file for design tools, and next to the logo download.

Brand colours in Freedam

• The Colors section of the brand guide holds named palettes. Administrators enter each colour's name, HEX value and Pantone reference. Freedam fills in the RGB and CMYK values from the HEX code, and a Manual switch lets you enter the CMYK values your printer supplied.
• Anyone who can open the guide copies a HEX, RGB, CMYK or Pantone value with one click, and Download Color Palette exports all palettes as an ASE swatch file that opens in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
• Colour search finds images whose palette contains a colour close to your brand colour, with an adjustable tolerance, and the search can be saved for the whole team.
• Brand rules can include an exact check that listed brand colours cover a minimum share of an image's palette.
• Themes for custom pages set six colours as hex codes, and button text switches between dark and white to stay readable on the primary colour.

The free brand center generator reads the palette from your homepage and shows it applied to a brand center. Create a brand center explains the next steps.

Frequently asked questions

How many brand colours should a brand have?

Usually one or two primary colours, two to four secondary colours and a set of neutrals. Beyond about eight non-neutral colours, a palette becomes hard to remember and to apply consistently.

What is the difference between Pantone C and U?

C references are printed on coated paper, U references on uncoated paper. The ink is the same, but uncoated paper absorbs more of it, so a U swatch looks darker and less saturated than its C counterpart.

Can a colour be registered as a trademark?

In many jurisdictions, yes, but usually only when the company can show that the public links that colour to its products in a specific category. The registration identifies the colour precisely, often by a Pantone reference.