An aspect of branding I found particularly interesting and had a profound impact on my project, was colour. We learnt about colour and its impact on branding on week 5 of the semester. Although we have learnt about colour in the first semester, this lesson was about its impact on branding.

There are many reasons why colour has a significant impact on branding, one of them being accessibility. Ensuring accessibility in your branding is vital in order to be successful. For instance, if you chose a colour scheme that doesn’t fit the accessibility standard's, it ruins the experience for the customer that may have visual impairments, which means they won’t use your product again. This is especially vital in digital design as we interact with digital products on a daily basis. It is almost inhumane to choose colours that don’t fit the accessibility standards as people shouldn’t struggle to see or use your products because of the colour choice you like. Globally, at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment, therefore, designs must be fit for all. With this point in mind, I wanted to make sure that the colour scheme of my brand fit the standards. It did not. In a result of this I completely changed the colour palette of my brand.

Another interesting thing about colour is its psychology. Interestingly, colours have meanings and can convey emotions. Many brands take advantage of this, that’s why so many banking brands are ‘Banking Blue’ as blue represents trust. I find it fascinating that we can look at a colour and how emotions can be evoked because of it for example, when we see any bright colours such as yellow it has happy connotations whereas darker colours convey sad and depressing emotions. Following this point, colours have different meanings in other cultures. For example, red represents danger and warning in western culture, but in eastern culture, red represents luck and good fortune. I think that this information is great to know as designers need to be careful when choosing their colour scheme incase you want your brand to be successful internationally. People could avoid your brand based on what the colours represent.

In contrast to this, some may see the colour choosing part of the design process as an easy task and not as time consuming. People brush it off like it doesn’t have as much meaning as it does.

The impact colour had on my brand was astounding. As I previously mentioned, I had to change my brands colour scheme as it didn’t fit the accessibility standards. After this I went in a totally different direction and changed it to navy and yellow. However something still wasn’t right with the colours. The change of shade completely transformed my design and it changed the overall tone of my brand. It became sophisticated and elegant, rather than childish.

To conclude, colour is crucial when it comes to design, particularly in branding. The choice of colour can make or break your design, or even a brand. This is why colour was an aspect of branding I found interesting. As someone that loves bright colours anyway, discovering the importance and meaning of them in a brand was truly fascinating to me.