Choosing brand colours that hold up in the real world

Picking brand colours is the fun part, so people spend a lot of time on the wrong version of the problem. They'll agonise over whether the teal should be slightly greener, staring at two swatches side by side on a nice monitor. Then the brand goes live and that teal is on a flex board in the afternoon sun, on a business card printed at a shop in Ameerpet, and shrunk to a 40-pixel circle on someone's phone - and in every one of those places it looks like a different colour.

So the test I actually care about isn't "is this the perfect shade," it's "does this still read as our colour when everything goes wrong." A few things we check now, mostly because we've been burned before. Does the main colour have enough contrast to put white text on it - because someone will, on a button, on day one. Does it hold up in plain CMYK without a fluorescent ink, because most local printing isn't going to match a fancy Pantone. Is there a darker version for small text and a lighter version for backgrounds, so people aren't forced to use the one loud brand colour everywhere.

For PAL Physiotherapy we ended up with a fairly deep navy and a calm teal, partly because it needed to feel clinical and trustworthy, but also because navy just behaves well - it prints dark, it holds white text, it doesn't turn muddy on a cheap screen. Compare that to a brand like Beyond Bajji or Ayur Gum where the whole point is that the packaging is loud and appetising on a shelf. Different job, so the palette is built differently - more saturation, more contrast between flavours, colours chosen to survive being one of thirty products someone is scanning past.

The other thing that saves you is having rules, not just colours. Which colour is allowed to be a big background fill and which one is only ever an accent. What the one approved colour for body text is. What happens on a dark background versus a light one. When Sahadeva Reddy needed a range of sweet boxes that clearly belonged to the same family but weren't identical, it worked because the system decided that up front - same structure, shifting colourway - instead of someone freestyling each box.

If you're choosing colours right now, do yourself a favour and mock the palette onto the ugliest, most real thing you can - a delivery invoice, a WhatsApp DP, a printout from a normal office printer. If it still feels like you there, you've got a palette. If it only works in the moodboard, you've got a mood. Getting this right is a big part of our brand guidelines and identity work, and it's a lot less glamorous than people expect.