Choosing colors for my personal brand

This past week I decided to tackle the first task on my list: exploring color theory and creating a color palette for my new personal brand.

Palette Requirements:

• should consist of 4—5 colors
• must include 1 or 2 colors that are subtle enough to use as an accent color within my resume (yes, I want to use color in my resume, how bold of me!)
• must be web- and print-friendly

Past Color Schemes

This is the color scheme from the very first iteration of my portfolio. I thought it was pretty nice, but received several comments from friends and colleagues suggesting that the pastel colors weren’t very representative of my personality. To be honest, I chose purple and green because I like them and pink because it complements the other 2 colors. This is actually a fairly “correct” compound color scheme but I eventually chose to abandon it in favor of a bolder color scheme.

This is the color scheme from the current iteration of my portfolio. As you can see, I tried to get away from the pastel shades, but somehow green managed to stick around (what can I say, green is my favorite color!). Yikes. When I put these colors next to each other, they look pretty gnarly. Maybe it’s just the goldenrod, but I’ll be the first to admit that this palette needs to go!

…but where to start as far as choosing new colors?

Selecting New Colors

I typed “what is my color” into Google and the first site I found was COLORSTROLOGY. I navigated to my birthday (June 8) and discovered that my color is golden apricot. It’s really a lovely color, and its description is rather nice as well, so I decided to start there.

I checked my Delicious bookmarks for some color resources I could use to make a palette.

Using Adobe’s kuler, I generated some color palettes, which I then posted to both kuler and COLOURlovers so that other users could vote on them and provide me with feedback. I made some palettes that included the golden apricot color and some that didn’t.

Verifying Printer-Friendliness

One of my palette requirements states that the colors must be both web- and print-friendly. I knew that the colors are web-friendly, but I have not worked with print documents a lot and wasn’t sure how to verify if colors would be printer-safe. A quick Google search informed me that in order for my colors to print accurately, I must choose colors that are in-gamut.

So I consulted my good friend Photoshop to see if my palette was indeed printer-safe. I learned a pretty easy way to do this:

With your Color Picker menu open, use Ctrl-Shift-Y to see which of the colors in the selected range will be printable.

The grayed-out areas will not print accurately. Hit Ctrl-Shift-Y again to exit this view.

I had to tweak a few of my colors to make sure they were suitable for both web and print documents, but this Photoshop trick made the tweaking pretty easy.

Proposed Color Scheme

One of my highest voted palettes was a palette I affectionately named “Not So Subtle.” It’s a bright set of colors and reminds me of fruit, something a company like Jamba Juice might use. Without further ado, I present to you my proposed color scheme:

(Once again, green made the final cut.)

I would love to hear your feedback on the new color palette. Good, bad, or otherwise. I’m still open to revising my color choices since nothing is set in stone.

Next up, I will be tackling typefaces. I’m a big typography junkie, so I’m looking forward to it. If you have any resources to pass along to me, feel free to do so!

Tagged as branding, color, marketing