The color palette mistake almost every new brand makes

New clients almost always arrive with strong opinions about which specific colors they want in their brand palette, and reasonably so, color is one of the most immediately visible parts of any brand identity. What's far less discussed, and far more common as an actual mistake, is having too many colors treated with roughly equal visual weight, rather than picking the wrong colors outright.

A palette with six colors all competing for equal attention produces a visually noisy, indecisive brand, regardless of how individually appealing each specific color might be on its own. This is the mistake we correct most often, more than any specific complaint about hue or shade choice.

A larger palette feels flexible, like it offers more options for different contexts and different pieces of collateral down the road. In practice, a large palette with no clear hierarchy just means every new piece of design work involves a fresh, unresolved debate about which colors to actually use this time, since nothing in the system establishes real priority among the options.

We push clients toward a much smaller core palette, with clear, explicit rules about which color is genuinely primary and which are secondary or purely accent, precisely because clarity reduces future decision fatigue far more than flexibility ever ends up doing in day-to-day practice.

One dominant primary color, used for the most important brand moments and key actions. One or two secondary colors, used more sparingly for supporting elements and layout. A small handful of neutral tones for text and backgrounds, doing the bulk of the actual visual work across most pages and materials, quietly and reliably in the background.

This structure sounds restrictive when described plainly, and it's actually liberating in practice, because it resolves the vast majority of future color decisions automatically, according to a clear rule, rather than requiring a fresh debate every single time a new piece of collateral needs to get made.

Accent colors, meant to draw attention to something specific like a call-to-action button, only work if they're genuinely rare on the page. An accent color used everywhere stops functioning as an accent entirely and just becomes visual noise competing with everything else, unable to draw attention to anything in particular anymore.

We enforce this rule strictly in every brand guide we build: the accent color is reserved specifically for the single most important action on any given page, and nowhere else, no matter how tempting it is to reach for that same eye-catching color again somewhere else on the page.

We ask clients to imagine designing an entire page using only three colors total. Which three would they genuinely keep. This forces real prioritization in a way that open-ended color selection conversations rarely do on their own, and it's usually the fastest, most direct path we've found to a genuinely usable, disciplined palette.

The colors that survive this exercise consistently turn out to be the ones the client actually cares about most. The ones that get cut are almost always colors that were included more out of a vague sense of completeness than any real conviction behind including them specifically.

We don't force the issue if a client is genuinely committed to a larger palette after seeing the tradeoffs laid out clearly. We do insist on a documented hierarchy even within a larger palette, so at least there's a clear, explicit primary versus secondary versus rarely-used distinction, rather than treating every color as equally available and equally weighted by default.

This compromise usually satisfies both goals reasonably well: the client keeps the full range of colors they're personally attached to, and the resulting design work still has enough real structure to avoid the visual noise problem that an undisciplined, flat palette would otherwise produce.

Brands with a genuinely disciplined palette look more confident and more consistent across every piece of collateral we produce, from the website to a printed flyer to a social media template, without needing extensive additional guidance for each new specific use case that comes up down the road.

We can point to this pattern directly across our own portfolio: the strongest, most cohesive-looking brand identities we've built are, without exception, the ones with the smallest, most disciplined core palettes, not the ones with the widest range of colors available to choose from.

Pull up your last five pieces of marketing material side by side, a social post, a flyer, a slide deck, an email, and count how many colors actually appear across all of them combined. If the number is meaningfully higher than four or five, that's usually a sign the palette lacks the kind of hierarchy that would otherwise keep decisions consistent from one piece of collateral to the next.

We run this exact check with new clients before ever proposing a new palette, because it's a fast, concrete way to make an abstract problem visible using materials the client already has sitting around, rather than describing the issue purely in the abstract before showing any real evidence of it.

More colors doesn't mean more brand flexibility, it usually means more unresolved decisions, deferred to every single future project that touches the brand, one at a time, indefinitely.

We'd rather help a client fall in love with three or four colors, used with real intention and real hierarchy, than watch them try to make eight colors work together without any clear priority guiding how they're actually meant to be used.

This is one of the first conversations we have in any branding project now, because getting the palette size and hierarchy right early saves real friction across every single piece of design work that follows for years afterward, long after the original branding project itself has wrapped and everyone's moved on to other things.

It's a small conversation to have early, and it consistently prevents a much larger, more diffuse problem from quietly accumulating across every future piece of collateral a brand ever produces, one small unguided decision at a time, across years of a brand's ongoing life.