How many colours does a brand really need?

Open the guidelines of a company that’s been trading for five years and you’ll find a palette page with nine or ten swatches. Then look at its website and count what’s actually on screen. We did this with the last 23 brands that came to us for a rebrand: the median guideline listed nine colours, and the median homepage used three.

The other six weren’t wrong. They were unemployed. Nobody knew what they were for, so nobody touched them, until someone used all of them in one sales deck.

Count jobs, not swatches

Colour does a handful of jobs in a brand. Before anyone here picks a hex code, we list them on the first page of the Figma file:

• Be recognised. The colour people would name if you asked them.

• Carry text. A dark and a light that pass contrast at body size.

• Sort things. Menus, product lines or skin types told apart at a glance.

• Signal. Errors, warnings and success states inside a product.

Every brand has the first two jobs, which makes three colours: one of your own, a dark and a light. The other two jobs only exist in some businesses, and their colours arrive when the job does.

One colour you can own

Corte is a video editing app for teams of two to ten, launching against tools ten times its size. To look calm beside them, it got one colour, the red of the cut mark on its own timeline, with everything else in black and off-white.

Viga, a firm of bridge engineers, gets by on steel grey and the red primer its beams arrive in. Prumo, a building contractor in Coimbra, has black and a hi-vis orange. In both cases the second colour is loud enough that a third would only argue with it.

That test retires more swatches than any debate in a review. A coral that glows on a calibrated monitor can come back from the printer looking like wet cardboard.

When more colours earn their place

Some businesses have several things to tell apart, and colour does that fastest. Here’s what each palette in this article is for:

Colour that sorts

FOME is a delivery kitchen with five menus and no dining room. Riders kept mixing up orders because every bag looked the same, so each menu got its own colour band: burgers red, bakery ochre, sweets rose. The kitchen packs by colour, and the riders check by it.

Barro had fourteen clay skincare products, each designed the year it launched. One pale colour per skin type turned a jumbled shelf back into a range.

Colour that signals

Chave is property software for landlords with a few flats each. Its dashboard draws every flat as a door in quiet neutrals, and a door turns red only when its rent is late. Because red appears nowhere else, a landlord opening the app on a Monday finds the late flat first.

A word of warning

Signal colours belong to the product, not the brand. Keep them out of the logo, the ads and the social templates, or red stops meaning “something broke”.

Shrinking the palette you already have

You don’t need a rebrand to fix a nine-swatch palette. Gather last year’s website, sales deck and social posts, then tally which colours appear more than twice. Whatever misses the tally can retire, and each survivor gets one written job.

It takes an afternoon and a highlighter. For a second pair of eyes on what’s left, tell us what you’re launching.