Graphic Design Tips and Hacks (For Non-Artists)

Choosing a Compelling Color Scheme Appropriate for Your Brand

Hacking your way through graphic design starts at understanding how color schemes affect your brand’s influence over your audience. Creating and designing under the authority of a color scheme is no cakewalk. You may initially find some colors to be very appealing, but as time goes on you can feel restrained by their use. No matter what you’re en route to design, however—email campaigns, sales materials, marketing collateral—the color scheme you choose should hit right on the mark with your product or service offering.

 All of your design elements will ride on your color scheme and your scheme should be consistent across your materials, so tread lightly. Don’t choose something that risks overwhelming your audience. At the same time, remember that there is a fine line between simplicity and the mundane.

Staring at a blank canvas is intimidating and if you aren’t artistically inclined, choosing a design color scheme can be even more ambitious. No matter your experience level, there are some solutions and rules to follow that can help you initiate your own design strategy without falling completely down the rabbit hole. Here are some ways to create a color scheme appropriate to your branding strategy.
 
Choose a Cohesive Color Scheme

No matter what colors you decide on, if they’re not cohesive your design will simply not be appealing. You may decide to pick colors from your company logo, or you may decide to stay in the same color family or temperature (warm or cool). Choosing the latter is a little more difficult to conceive all on your own, but if your company’s colors are extremely bright or dark it may be a more suitable and aesthetically pleasing option.

For example, we recently released our eBook, Transitioning to Blended Learning and Development Content, with colors that play outside of Mimeo’s logo which is composed of the printing colors:  cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black). While our company colors are appropriate to being a print and digital content distribution company, having the 4 printing colors draped across every design element can be overwhelming. With a cohesive color scheme, your design will be much more pulled together and will garner a lot of positive attention. However, creating a color scheme isn’t all that simple.

Luckily, for those of us who aren’t graphic designers there are sites that exist just for the sole purpose of delivering you with alluring color schemes. Coolors is just one of these sites – a color scheme generator website and app. To begin, simply start the generator and click the spacebar if you’re on your computer, or tap the screen if you’re on your phone or tablet.

Graphic Design Tips are Influenced by Color PalettesCoolors will generate different color schemes that you can export via URL, email, PDF, or PNG formats. If the generator spits out a scheme that you like, but you aren’t completely sold on it, you can finetune the palettes to your liking. You also have the option to browse popular palettes created by other users from the Coolors community. If this seems too advantageous for your design abilities, you can also upload an image and choose colors from that image.

Consider Your Target Audience

The colors you choose truly navigate around their intended audience. The audience you seek out drastically changes the colors that you choose. Bright, bold color schemes are attention grabbers. If you’re printing out promotional flyers then you may be more lenient towards vibrant hues that attract attention from across a room or catch the eye of a busy passerby walking down the street.

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