Creating a Custom Color Palette

Color! It’s such a powerful tool—for setting the mood and for creating a recognizable look. And you, master of your brand, have decided to go custom. So let’s get into it.

Getting us a custom color palette requires two steps…

One: The color palette must exist. (You’re welcome. So happy to share our expertise.)
Two: The color palette must be given to us. (I know—you’re learning so much.)

One: Finalize or create your color palette.

Your palette should have five colors. Here’s how we use them:

And here’s what you should keep in mind:

1. Headings & Body Copy
This should be a dark color—dark enough to be used for words. It should contrast against a light background and be clearly legible.

2. Buttons & Links
This is your action color! We will ONLY use this for buttons and links, which essentially trains the website user to look for one color when they want to click something.

3. Buttons on Hover
Buttons will change to this color when the user hovers over them with their mouse. A lovely opportunity to bring in moments of color.

4. Background Areas
Go very light on this color and possibly quite neutral. We want the website to feel airy and bright…and this color will allow us to highlight or box out some areas… without feeling visually heavy.

5. Website Background
Probably just white, right? Although we do occasionally use a pale cream or greige.

Two: Give it to us.

How you do this will depend on your situation:

1. Your visual branding was created by an agency or designer.
   Great! Just pass along the document or style guide they gave you. Upload it to your project material folder or shoot us an email at hello@gloryandbrand.com. Done.
2. You’re creating your own color palette.
   Also great! Sure, you can do this in design software (Illustrator, etc.) but the free version of Canva works beautifully. Just create five boxes on a document, fill in the color, and export the whole thing to pdf. Send that to us and we’ll take it from there.

Thank you! Let us know if you have ANY questions.