Most brand palettes are chosen on a big screen, at large sizes, on white. Then the logo goes onto a business card, the brand colour becomes a link in body text, someone builds a dark-mode site, and half the palette stops working. The fix is not better taste. It is checking the palette against the jobs it will actually have to do, before anyone signs it off.
How many colours you actually need
A working palette is usually five to seven values, not twenty. One primary that carries the brand. One secondary for support and variety. One accent used sparingly for the thing you want clicked. Then neutrals — a near-black for text, a mid grey for secondary text, and one or two light greys for backgrounds and borders.
The neutrals do more work than anything else and get chosen last, if at all. That is backwards. On a typical page, ninety per cent of what a viewer sees is text on a background, and both are neutrals. Pick them deliberately: a pure black on pure white is harsh, while a very dark warm grey on an off-white reads more comfortably and still passes contrast checks.
Resist adding a colour because a slide looks empty. Every extra value multiplies the decisions everyone downstream has to make, and the ones nobody can justify are the ones that get misused.
Check contrast before sign-off, not after
Contrast is the single most common reason a palette has to be reworked after approval. The rule most clients and platforms follow is WCAG: body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background, and large text — roughly 24px, or 19px bold — needs 3:1. Interface elements like buttons and form borders need 3:1 as well.
The trap is that a colour can look strong and still fail. Mid-tone oranges, yellows and light greens are the usual offenders: vivid on screen, and nowhere near 4.5:1 against white. If your brand colour is one of those, decide early what happens when it needs to carry text. Usually the answer is a darker variant reserved for text and links, with the bright original kept for fills and graphics.
Run every planned combination through a contrast checker while the palette is still a draft — primary on white, primary on the dark neutral, white on primary, and the accent on both backgrounds. It takes a few minutes and it removes the worst kind of revision, the one that arrives after the brand book is printed.
Build variants, not just colours
A single hex value is not enough for real work. Each main colour needs a lighter and a darker version — for hover states, disabled states, borders, tinted backgrounds and the darker text variant mentioned above.
Generate these by adjusting lightness while keeping hue and saturation roughly constant, rather than picking new colours by eye. Working in HSL makes this obvious in a way that hex does not: the same hue at 30%, 50% and 70% lightness reads as one family, while three hand-picked hexes usually do not. A colour format converter moves values between HEX, RGB and HSL when you need to think in one and deliver in another.
One caution: equal steps in lightness do not look equal to the eye. Yellows appear to jump brighter than blues at the same value, so trust what you see over what the numbers say, and adjust.
Print and screen will not match, and that is normal
Screens make colour by adding light; print makes it by absorbing it. RGB can produce vivid colours that CMYK ink simply cannot reach — bright oranges, electric blues and pure saturated greens are the usual casualties. A brand colour chosen on a monitor can come back from the printer looking muddy, and no calibration fixes that, because the ink cannot physically produce it.
Plan for it rather than being surprised. If the brand will be printed at all, agree a Pantone or CMYK equivalent alongside the screen value, and check it on a physical proof rather than a PDF. Expect the printed version to sit slightly duller, and choose a screen colour that still looks right when it does.
The same applies in reverse to uncoated paper, which absorbs more ink and dulls everything further, and to fabric or vinyl, which have their own limits.
Write it down properly
A palette that lives in one designer's head causes drift within weeks. Document each colour with its hex value, its RGB and CMYK equivalents, and — more importantly — what it is for. "Primary. Headings, primary buttons, and the logo. Not for body text." is far more useful than a swatch with a hex code under it.
Include the failing combinations too. Writing "never use the accent on the light grey background — it fails contrast" prevents the mistake more reliably than hoping nobody tries it.
Common questions
How many colours should a brand palette have?
Usually five to seven: a primary, a secondary, one accent, and two or three neutrals for text and backgrounds. Fewer than that gets restrictive; more than that and the extra values tend to be used inconsistently because nobody is sure what they are for.
What contrast ratio do brand colours need to pass?
WCAG asks for 4.5:1 for normal body text against its background, 3:1 for large text of roughly 24px or 19px bold, and 3:1 for interface elements such as buttons and input borders. Many mid-tone brand colours fail against white, which is why a darker text variant is usually needed alongside the original.
Why does my brand colour look different when printed?
Screens create colour with light and print creates it with ink, and ink cannot reach some of the brightest screen colours. Vivid oranges, greens and blues are the ones that most often come back duller. Agree a CMYK or Pantone equivalent early and check it on a physical proof rather than on a monitor.
Should I pick colours in HEX or HSL?
Pick in HSL and deliver in HEX. HSL separates hue, saturation and lightness, which makes building consistent lighter and darker variants straightforward — you change one number. HEX gives no such structure, so variants picked by eye often drift in hue without anyone noticing until they sit side by side.
Last updated 2 September 2026