How to choose brand colors and fonts for a small business

To choose brand colors and fonts for a small business, start with what your customers already connect with you, like your sign or your logo. Then give each color a job, test the colors on a phone, and only after that pick two fonts: one with character for headlines and one plain font for everything else. Done in that order, it takes an afternoon, not a month.

Start with what you already own

Most owners open a palette generator first. That is backwards. If you have run the business for a while, you already have colors: the paint on the storefront, the awning, the uniforms, the van, the cups, the old logo. Customers have seen those for years.

Walk around the business with your phone and photograph everything that carries a color on purpose. Then look at the photos side by side. Usually one or two colors keep coming back. Those are your starting point, even if you never chose them consciously.

If you are brand new and have nothing yet, start from the feeling instead. Write three words about how you want to come across, such as "calm, clean, local" or "loud, fun, cheap". Every color you consider later has to fit those three words.

Give each color a job

A palette is not a set of colors you like. It is a set of colors with jobs. Four jobs cover almost everything a small business makes:

That is four colors. You can add a fifth, a second accent for seasonal posts, but stop there. More colors make every post look like it came from a different business.

Write down the code of each one, the six characters after a # sign, such as #3F5B2E. "Green" means a hundred different things to a hundred printers and designers. A code means exactly one.

Test the colors before you commit

A palette that looks great on a laptop can fall apart on a customer's phone. Run these four checks before you print anything.

1. The contrast check. Put your text color on your background color in a free contrast checker such as the one from WebAIM. The web accessibility standard (WCAG) asks for a ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text, which it defines as 18 point, or 14 point bold. If your pair fails, darken the text or lighten the background until it passes.
2. The red and green check. About 1 in 12 men have some color vision deficiency, according to the National Eye Institute, and the most common type makes red and green hard to tell apart. So never let color alone carry the message. A sale price in red next to a regular price in green needs a word or a strike-through too.
3. The sunlight check. Make a test post and look at it on your phone outside, with the screen at half brightness. Pale colors on pale backgrounds vanish first.
4. The street check. Look up the two or three competitors closest to you. If the main one is already known for the same shade of blue, pick something else. You want to be remembered as yourself, not confused with them.

A note on the logo: the WCAG standard says text that is part of a logo or brand name has no contrast requirement. Your logo can be subtle. Your captions, prices and opening hours cannot.

Choosing fonts

Fonts are easier than colors, because you only need two.

The headline font carries the personality. It shows up in a few words at a time: the name of a dish, "Open Sunday", a price. A font with rounded letters feels friendly, a tall narrow one feels modern, a classic serif feels established. Match it to your three words.

The body font has one job: be easy to read at small sizes. Choose a plain font with open letters and clear numbers. Type "$12.50, Tue to Sat, 8 to 4" in it and read it at the size of a phone caption. If a 1 looks like an l, or the $ sign is odd, move on.

A few more rules worth keeping:

• Two fonts, not five. You can use the bold and regular weight of the same font for variety.
• Script fonts for two words, never for a paragraph. Handwriting styles are charming in a headline and painful in a menu description.
• Check the license. Most fonts on Google Fonts use the SIL Open Font License, and some use the Apache license. The Open Font License says its fonts can be used in books, posters, artwork, logos and on websites, with no credit required. A font you buy comes with its own license terms instead, so read them before a sign maker or web designer needs the files.
• Pick fonts you can get everywhere. If your designer, your printer and the person making your posts cannot all install the same font, your brand will drift. A free font avoids that problem.

Write it down on one page

Once you have decided, put everything on a single page or in a single folder:

• the four or five color codes, each labeled with its job
• the names of your two fonts, with a download link
• one example post that uses them correctly
• three rules, for example "prices always in the accent color", "never text on a busy photo", "the logo always sits in a corner"

Send that page to anyone who makes anything for you: the person who runs your social media, the printer, the sign shop. It is the cheapest way to look consistent, and it saves you from answering the same questions every time.

If you are still deciding what to post with your new look, our simple plan for using social media as a small business is a good next step.

When to hand it off

Doing this yourself works well when you already have a logo you like and colors customers recognize. It is worth paying a designer when you have no logo at all, when you are about to order an expensive sign, wrap or packaging, or when you have tried three palettes and still cannot decide.

If what you mainly need is a look for social media, we offer that as a one-time job called Brand Kit Design, for $199. It includes a color palette and two fonts that fit your business, your logo cleaned up for social media (or a simple wordmark if you have none), post and story templates, and highlight covers. It is a look for social media, not a full brand identity. You can find it with our other one-time services on the pricing page.