How to Tell a Brand's Story with Color
Colors are one of a web designer’s most useful tools, helping them to trigger immediate and long-term emotional responses in visitors.
When employed strategically, the emotional and symbolic weight people assign to colors can help you visually tell a client’s story–the central narrative underpinning everything they do and are about. In doing so, every color along the visible spectrum carries a unique and powerful opportunity to elicit a sense of connection with your client’s brand, establish brand identity, and ultimately, compel visitors to convert.
Understanding the brand
To effectively tell color stories on your client’s site, you need to understand their brand. Work with your client or explore existing brand assets like style guides, existing marketing materials, and past interviews. These materials can help you clarify their values, personality, voice, mission statement, and audience.
Here are some questions you can ask a new client to help discover their brand ethos:
What makes your brand unique?
What is your core message?
If your brand had a voice, what would it sound like?
In your view, what color does your brand most “feel” like?
Where in the world does your brand originate?
What are some key competitors in your industry?
How long has your brand been around?
Who is your primary audience–and what other audiences can resonate with your brand, products, and services?
Learn how to create a strong brand identity.
Interpreting brand traits into color language
Now, you can start to define your client’s color language, the explicit words and feelings associated with their colors:
Vibrant colors with high saturation levels, as well as contrasting colors, communicate energy and are perceived as bold or playful
Muted colors with low saturation communicate restraint and calm
Rich or deep, like gold, crimson, or burgundy, give a feeling of luxury, prestige, and value
Colors also have unique “temperatures” associated with feelings:
Warm colors like red, orange, and yellow evoke warmth, energy, and excitement
Cool colors, like green, blue, and purple, solicit feelings of calmness, serenity, and trust
When colors of similar temperatures are grouped together, the resulting color palettes will also have consistent temperatures.
Choose a temperature for your client’s site that best fits the stories they want to tell about their brand. For example, warm colors can energize and excite, making them a strong fit for entertainment brands looking to generate enthusiasm around films or shows. In contrast, cool colors can convey calm and trust, which is ideal for artists inviting visitors into a reflective creative space or wellness brands aiming to communicate care and balance.
Building a story-driven palette
A strong color palette starts with a clear understanding of your client’s brand personality, values, and goals. With that foundation, you can select colors that support their message and shape how visitors experience their site. Here are the key types of colors to include in a palette, along with tips for choosing them strategically:
Main color
Your client’s main color should capture the essence of their brand story in a single, intentional hue. Consider what color best reflects their identity and values. For example, a large corporation might want to convey trust and stability, making blue, a color often associated with clarity and dependability, a strong choice. A hotel website, on the other hand, may use a more neutral color, like beige or white, as the prevailing main color to create a welcoming feeling that effortlessly propels the visitor through the site.
Pictured above: The primary colors red, yellow, and blue, respectively, bold colors used in differing shades by many brands as main colors.
Accent colors
Accent colors create emphasis by contrasting with or complementing your client’s primary color. When used thoughtfully, they add visual interest and bring energy to the design. This helps extend the brand story and allows key elements to stand out in a more engaging, cohesive way.
Pictured above: The secondary colors green, orange, and purple, respectively, great as main colors or as complementary or contrasting secondary colors to a client’s main color.
Pictured above: The tertiary colors blue-violet, red-violet, red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, and blue-green, respectively, each located between the primary and secondary colors on the color wheel–and each great for use as main or accent colors.
Neutral colors
Neutral colors have low saturation, which helps them support rather than compete with your client’s primary color. They provide balance, improve readability, and create space for the main and accent colors to stand out. Like accent colors, neutrals can also reinforce the brand’s narrative by setting the right tone and allowing key elements to shine within a clean, cohesive layout.
Pictured above: Neutral colors white, ivory, cream, beige, gray, and brown, respectively.
Using your client’s colors
Assign a clear function to each color you include in your client’s palette. The main color can help set the overall tone of the site, so it should appear consistently throughout the design. A contrasting accent color is ideal for drawing attention to key elements like calls to action. On content-heavy pages, such as blog posts or resource hubs, neutral colors can maintain visual focus and support readability without overwhelming the reader.
Once you’ve defined the purpose of each color in your client’s palette, it’s time to apply them across the site. Squarespace simplifies this process by offering five built-in sitewide color slots you can customize to reflect your client’s brand:
White or off-white
Light color
Accent color
Dark color
Black or off-black
Using Site Styles, create a color palette made up of these colors that wordlessly tells your client’s story. Then, note it in your client’s web design style guide for future use.
Learn about using color theory to create compelling, brand-aligned website palettes.
Evolving the color palette to tell a brand story
A well-chosen color palette becomes meaningful when applied with intention across a site. The way color is used from page to page can reflect the shape and tone of your client’s brand. A homepage might lean into deeper or more saturated colors to create a strong first impression, while interior pages like an about or services page can shift to lighter tones to feel more welcoming and personal. These changes guide visitors through the site and help express different aspects of the brand.
Whitespace is another valuable way to shape how visitors experience a site. Varying background shades and tints as users scroll can create a sense of flow and hierarchy without overwhelming the design. Use contrasting accent colors to call attention to important elements like newsletter forms, donation blocks, testimonials, or featured content.
As you decide on colors, consider how color ratios shape your client’s story. For example, using the client’s main color as the predominant color–especially a bold, saturated color like blue or red–can create a larger-than-life persona. This can be great for cybersecurity companies, health science firms, and schools looking to project an image of power and capability, but may be less effective for a photographer, artist, or folk band telling more personal stories about their brand. For clients like the latter, you can instead emphasize neutral colors like white as a way to spotlight their offerings, then use a vivid main or accent color that stands out for their logo or headshot to boldly spotlight their personal brand and connect their work back to them.
Together, your color choices can help emphasize the story your client wants to tell while supporting clarity and conversion.
Tell resonant brand and color stories
Compelling brand storytelling through color demands intentionality, empathy, and most of all, strategy. What’s more, a brand’s color palette should evolve with them. If you work regularly with your client, you can keep refining and testing the color palette to see how their audience responds. Remember: as a web designer, your job is to bring a brand’s voice to life online. With the right color choices, you’re equipped to make it happen.
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