Get your colours right where they're expensive to get wrong.
Your brand's colours end up on signage, uniforms, packaging and print, not just a screen. Those are the hard things to change. We help you choose a palette that works everywhere, and lasts.
The website is the last thing to worry about
Most colour advice treats your website as the place it matters most. It isn't. If a colour's wrong on your site, we change a few values and it's fixed in minutes. Get it wrong on ten thousand printed booklets, a shopfront sign, a fleet of van liveries and a run of embroidered uniforms, and it's slow and costly to put right.
So we choose your colours for the surfaces that are hard to change first, then carry them onto the website, not the other way round. That's the difference between treating colour as decoration and treating it as a decision you'll live with for years.
Your favourite colour probably isn't the answer
Here's the uncomfortable part: your favourite colour is often the wrong choice for the business. Colour is the first thing people register, before they've read a word, and it quietly tells them what kind of business you are. The job isn't self-expression. It's fitting your sector enough to be trusted, and standing out enough to be remembered. A neon-lime palette might feel fun to you and still send a prospective client looking for a solicitor straight back to the search results.
A structure that works: 60-30-10
You don't need to be a designer to get this right. A long-standing rule keeps most palettes balanced.
- 60% a calm base, usually white or a soft neutral, so the content can breathe.
- 30% your main brand colour, carrying the structure: headers, footers, key elements.
- 10% one accent, reserved for the action you want, the "money" colour on a Buy or Contact button. It earns its place precisely because you don't use it anywhere else.
It's the same discipline we hold ourselves to: one reserved accent for the single most important action, not colour scattered everywhere competing for attention.
Colour by sector, as a tendency not a rule
Look at your industry before the colour wheel. These are leanings, not laws.
- Law and finance: deep blues and greys signal stability and heritage.
- Health and care: greens and soft teals read as growth, calm and safety.
- Food and retail: reds and oranges lift energy and appetite.
- Tech: clean neutrals with a vivid accent read as modern and confident.
The point isn't to copy your sector. It's to know the convention before you decide whether to follow it or break it on purpose.
Colour you can actually read
Colour isn't only about looks. People have to be able to read it. Pale grey text on white can look sleek and lock out anyone with low vision, and in the UK accessible design is an Equality Act consideration, not just good manners. We check text against its background for proper contrast, and we never lean on colour alone to carry meaning.
That last point matters more than people expect. "Click the red button" fails anyone who can't distinguish it; "click the red Buy now button" works for everyone. Roughly one in twelve men has some form of colour blindness, so we avoid putting red and green hard against each other where the difference is the whole message. (More in our accessibility statement.)
Pick colours that last
Trends come and go. Earthy sage and terracotta are having a moment; the "corporate cool" of the last decade has cooled. The brands that age well usually settle on a stable core and let the trends live only in the accents, the things that are cheap to change. We'll help you separate the timeless from the faddish, so you're not re-signwriting a shopfront in three years because a palette dated.
Colour and your logo travel together
Your colours never travel alone. They go onto the sign, the van, the business card, the email footer, the social profile, alongside your logo. That's why we prefer to settle colour and logo together with the website, so the typography, proportions and palette are consistent from the first surface to the last. Get that right once and everything downstream is easier.
A word from a client
"We revamped our site from a dark, heavy grey to clean white with pale pink accents on AMD's advice. Our enquiry submissions doubled in the first month. Colour clearly makes a difference." — Sarah Jenkins, Let's Get Ready Boutique (Walsall)
Let's choose colours you won't regret on a sign.
Or call us. Birmingham 0121 284 1610 · Walsall 01922 210724