Choosing Colours and Fonts for Your Brand
Most small businesses choose their colours and fonts in an afternoon, often by picking a favourite shade and whichever typeface came with the logo. That is understandable, but these two decisions end up on every page, sign, invoice and social post for years. A little more thought at the start saves a great deal of fiddling later, and it does not require a design degree.
This guide covers the practical side: how to choose colours that stay readable, how to make them match between screen and print, and how to pick fonts that look tidy everywhere you use them.
Start with the job, not the favourite colour
Colour carries associations, but they are looser than many guides suggest. Blue is popular with accountants and IT firms because it reads as calm and dependable; greens are common for gardeners and anything environmental; bold reds and oranges suit businesses that want to feel energetic. None of these rules is fixed, and following them too closely can make you look like every competitor in your area.
A better starting point is the brand words you have already settled on. If you want to come across as "calm, thorough and local", soft, slightly muted tones will support that better than neon. If you have not done that groundwork yet, our guide to building a recognisable brand on a small-business budget walks through it.
Then look at what nearby competitors use. If every estate agent in town is navy and gold, a confident deep green might help you stand out on a busy high street or in a page of search results.
Build a small palette with clear roles
A workable palette usually has three parts:
- A main colour that people will associate with you. It appears in the logo, headings and key buttons.
- A neutral pair, typically a very dark grey or navy for text and an off-white or light grey for backgrounds. Pure black on pure white can feel harsh on screen.
- One accent colour used sparingly to draw attention: a "book now" button, a price, a special offer.
Give each colour a job and stick to it. If the accent appears everywhere, it stops drawing attention to anything.
Contrast comes first
The most common colour mistake is poor contrast: pale grey text on white, white text on a yellow button, or a mid-blue heading on a slightly darker blue band. It may look subtle on a large, bright monitor, but it becomes hard work on a phone in daylight or for anyone with less than perfect eyesight.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) give a useful benchmark. At the commonly used AA level, normal body text should have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background, and large text at least 3:1. Free online contrast checkers will tell you the ratio for any two colours in seconds, so test your text and button combinations before you commit.
Two further habits help:
- Never rely on colour alone to carry meaning. A form error shown only in red will be missed by some colour-blind visitors; add a word or an icon too.
- Check your palette in greyscale. If headings, buttons and body text still separate clearly, the contrast is doing its work.
Make colours match on screen and in print
Screens mix colour from light, using RGB values usually written as hex codes such as #1F4E79. Printers mix ink, normally using the four-colour CMYK process. Some bright screen colours, particularly vivid greens, oranges and electric blues, simply cannot be reproduced in standard CMYK and will print duller than expected.
To keep things consistent, record each brand colour in several formats:
- Hex for websites and social media graphics.
- RGB for other on-screen use such as presentations.
- CMYK for everyday printing such as leaflets and business cards.
- A Pantone reference if you ever need a precise spot colour, for example on signage or branded clothing.
Ask your printer for a proof before a large run, and compare it with previous printed material rather than with your monitor, which may not be calibrated. Uncoated paper also tends to make colours look softer than gloss or silk stock, so expect some variation between materials.
Choosing fonts that work everywhere
For most small businesses, two typefaces are plenty: one for headings and one for body text.
Body text: readability over personality
Body text needs to be comfortable to read at small sizes and in long paragraphs. Look for open letter shapes, a generous x-height (the height of lower-case letters such as "x" and "a") and clearly different forms for easily confused characters like capital I, lower-case l and the number 1. Plenty of well-made sans serif and serif fonts meet this test.
Headings: where you can show character
Headings are short, so you can afford more personality: a slab serif for a rugged trades business, an elegant serif for a florist, a rounded sans serif for a children's activity company. Avoid script or heavily decorative fonts for anything longer than a few words, and check they still read clearly in a narrow phone layout.
Licensing and practical checks
Make sure the fonts you choose are licensed for the way you plan to use them. Free libraries such as Google Fonts offer typefaces under open licences that cover both web and print use, which keeps things simple. Fonts bought from a foundry may need separate licences for desktop, web and app use, so read the terms.
Before you settle, set a real paragraph of your own copy, a price list and a heading in each candidate font.
Pairing and sizing
When combining two typefaces, aim for clear contrast rather than near-misses. A sturdy serif heading with a clean sans serif body works; two similar sans serifs look like a mistake. Keep body text on websites around 16 pixels or larger, with a line height of roughly one and a half times the font size, and limit line length so readers are not tracking across an entire wide screen.
Write it all down
Once you have decided, put the details on a single page: colour values in every format, font names and weights, heading and body sizes, and a couple of examples of the palette in use. Share it with your web designer, printer and anyone who produces social media graphics. Good choices only pay off when they are applied consistently, and a short written record is the simplest way to make sure that happens.