Designing a brand and signs for your business can feel overwhelming. However, you want your sign to positively impact potential customers and get them excited about what your business has to offer. Choosing the right color is an essential first step on the path to recognition.
What Message Does the Color of My Business Sign Send to Customers?
Historically, colors have been associated with specific feelings and emotions, eliciting a particular response in people. Businesses can use color choice to send a message to customers about their brand and intentions and help them associate their brand with various feelings.
Here are a few examples of what specific colors can represent emotionally:
- Red: courage, taking action, passion, and energy
- Orange: encouragement, optimism, warmth, creativity
- Yellow: happiness, sunshine, brightness, joy
- Green: nature, healing, health, abundance, rest
- Blue: security, trust, peace, authority, tranquility
- Purple: wisdom, compassion, sensitivity, mystery, bravery
- Pink: love, femininity, romantic, kindness
- Black: authority, power, secrecy, sophistication
- White: purity, cleanliness, peace, minimalism
Think about your business and what emotional connection you would like to make with people. Then, you can reinforce this image and message with customers through your brand’s color and signage.
How Can I Use Color Choice to Make My Business Sign Stand Out?
Your business sign must stand out in a world full of competing advertisements and billboards. Understanding how colors work together to create contrast and attention is helpful when designing your sign.
Color theory describes primary, secondary, and tertiary colors and can help give us combinations of colors that work well together. Choosing your message-sending colors is first, and using these colors to create contrast is the next step to help your logo, wording, and imagery stand out. People also need to read the wording on your sign clearly for it to be effective.
Generating contrast is typically done by combining darker-hued and lighter-hued colors, including some neutrals like black, white, gray, beige, and even navy blue. An example of a contrasting color scheme would be white or yellow text on a darker black, red, or blue background. A color wheel is a great tool for finding contrasting colors that work with your business’s brand design.
The Bottom Line
Business signs are a great marketing tool to advertise your business’s goods and services. Understanding color theory and the emotional ties to colors can help you create a distinctive and memorable sign that will leave a lasting impact on your potential customers.
